Now ending family violence is a laudable goal, I won’t argue with that. Who doesn’t want to end family violence? But I have to admit, things like that, things that say “all women” or “only women” or, for that matter, “only men” or “you can’t come because you’ve got a penis or vagina” or “there’s something wrong because you belong to “that” group of people’ always make me a bit nervous…

Oh, who am I kidding, things like that make me really nervous ’cause typically when you see that sort of exclusion you’re not getting whole picture. Typically, when you start pointing the finger at specific demographic categories you’re expressing some kind blind spot, bias, and bigotry in your thinking. If I point to Jewish people and say they are all “like this” or they are all “like that,” I’m being a bigoted racist. But the same doesn’t apply to gender, does it? We regularly point the finger at one gender or another and say “oh they are like this” or “they are like that.”

So what does gender bigotry have to do with this all women campaign?

Well when I read the pamphlet I asked myself the question, where are the men in this campaign to stop violence? Don’t they count? Aren’t they concerned? Why aren’t they included? The answer to that is easy. Men are the perpetrators of family violence, aren’t they? Men are the ones who act violently, who take up the knives, who shoot the guns and blow up the houses. Men are the perps. and women and children are the victims. It is not overly stated in the pamphlet, but it is certainly the common perception. Ask anybody and they’ll tell you, men are the problem and women and children are the victims.

But is that true?

Must “all women” stand against the violence perpetrated by “all men.”

Personally, I don’t think so and I can start with examples from my own life because as a child and teenager I was a victim of family violence, but not in the way you might expect. In fact, although I’ve experienced profound emotional and psychological abuse, not to mention serious, physical abuse, it has never been at the hands of the male of the species, but at the hands of the female species. To be perfectly blunt, from the time I was born it has been the females in my life that have abused me in ways that I still struggle to deal with.

Let me explain

When I was two my dad flocked off and left my mom to fend for herself with two small children. For the next ten or so years my mom, who I know loved me, nevertheless subjected my brother and I to emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. This women beat me and my brother with belts, spoons, and other household implements to the point where the implements broke and we were battered and bruised. The physical abuse was bad, as bad as any “daddy figure” could have subjected us to, but as bad as it was it was the emotional and psychological abuse that hurt the most. She used to force me and my brother into corners for long periods of time, cut us off from love for extended periods, make us feel small and unloved, and generally engage in textbook examples of emotional and psychological abuse. She even left us once or twice screaming and crying as she abandoned us to our own devices, all the while saying she was going to jump off the downtown bridge and kill herself! Can you imagine the emotional and psychological scarring that comes to the eight year old child listening to their mother threaten to leave them alone, desperate for the love, attention, and care that parents are supposed to provide. I won’t go into the details of the psychological and emotional impact of this long term and systemic abuse we experienced, but I don’t think you have to have a very developed imagination, or a graduate degree in psychology, to know this abuse affected us in a profoundly negative fashion.

And you know, for all the talk of women victims of male violence, it wasn’t just my mother who abused me. I remember my first girl friend, a female by the name of Bonnie, who once danced gaily around me all the while she was smacking me repeatedly in the face, laughing, and telling me I’d never understand why she was doing that. I have to admit, I didn’t understand why someone you had been dating for almost a year would treat you with such callous and mean spirited disregarded. All I could do was stand there in shock. And for those who think that men are innately violent let me point out that I didn’t strike back. All I did was stand there and take it. In retrospect I think it was that experience that solidified this basic truth for me that that on this world, the people most likely to hurt and abuse you are the people you let get close to you.

And that’s only two examples. Let me also mention in passing the catholic nun I had in grade one, the female English teacher, or my cousin who babysat us and thought it was funny to terrorize small children with stories of monsters under our beds, or any of the number of violent and abusive females in my life over the years.

Do you get the point?

If I had to answer a survey, based on my experience, on the gender that I felt was the most violent and mean, it would hands down be females.
Men don’t even register on the scale, in my experience.

And I know it is not just me that has experienced the violence of women. My wife and I have been doing couples counseling now and we see regular examples of violent women. In fact one couple we know has spent forty (that’s 40!) years seeing counselors for family violence in our little community of St. Albert. It’s an interesting story. They show up one day in a counsellor’s office and the female goes into a shpeal about how she’s the victim of an abusive husband. And the counselors? Well they act according to their social scripts, blame the husband, and proceed with counseling on those grounds. But what a farce that was. Forty years of clueless counseling! After I saw them a few sessions it became clear to me that in fact the female was also an abuser. For forty some years she has flailed and wailed, scratched and clawed, and heaped round after round of emotional and psychological abuse on her husband and her children and the surprising thing(?), no psychologist they’d seen (and they’d seen almost all of them in our sleepy little town of St. Albert, Alberta) has ever identified her as the abuser. She is a skillful manipulator, she knows the psychological establishment has an ideological blind spot when it comes to female abuse, and she plays that for all its worth. It’s a huge failure on the part of the St. Albert psychological establishment because as a result of their failure to see the reality of the situation, her children never got the help they needed and were subjected to over two decades of profound emotional abuse, with predictable pathological outcomes. And what’s particularly troublesome about this is that if, after forty years of watching this go on the husband finally snapped and slapped his wife, he would be the one arrested, charged, and put in jail. In other words, he would become a statistic and he would become “proof” of the violent male and consequently the reality of female violence would be submerged, hidden, and forgotten.

Perhaps you can see why I get so annoyed by the “all women” campaign.

Really?

All women want to stop family violence?

All women are victims?

All women need to stand together?

My question is simple? Why can’t the women who want to end family violence stand with the men who want to end family violence and work outside of socially scripted, and largely irrelevant, gender roles?

Why do they have to stand alone?

Why do they have to perpetrate the illusion that it’s only men that abuse?

Well, there are lots of reasons for that I think. One, the media panders to this illusion. They highlight examples of female abuse in the news, produce cop shop after cop show presenting us with a “reality” of male violence, or simply ignore the examples of female violence occurring all around them.
Two, men and women are socialized to use different types of violence, one visible and one invisible. Men are encouraged to use their fists, knives, and guns. Boys are given action figures and they learn to go around beating and blowing up anybody defined as “the bad guy.” Girls, on the other hand, are given dolls and Care Bears. If a girl picks up an action figure it will be taken away from her. As a result, girls and boys learn a different form of violence. Consequently, the violence men perpetrate is more visible. If you hit a child the bruise is obvious. But if you call it names and make it feel small or hurt its feelings, no visible scars are left.

And let me be clear that female violence, for all its invisibility, is no less hurtful or damaging than the male counterpart. As the vice principle at my daughter’s school recently told me (and as any elementary or middle school teacher will confirm) girls, after they have absorbed the hierarchical ranking behaviors that are taught by our schools, are far more cruel and vicious than boys are. Boys, says the principle, beat each other up in the school yard and then it is over, but girls go on constant, subtle, often coordinated, and deeply vicious attacks

Boys use their fists; girls use their emotions and their words.

It is just a different type of violence.

As a society we simply haven’t learned to register the type of violence and abuse that females engage in, but it is still profound and damaging. As one little boy who had a really violent childhood experience can attest (i.e. me), I’d have rather been beaten by a male than subjected to the ongoing emotional horror of the females in my life. At least with the beating, the pain goes away. At least if I had been beaten by a male, some social worker or psychologist or teacher may have noticed it, and I and my brother may have gotten the help we needed instead of, like the children of our St. Albert family, having to bare the abuse in silent obscurity for the decades of primary socialization we all go through.
Of course, there are other reasons for the invisibility of female violence besides the media’s ignorance or the quality of violence. A third reason is that we, and by “we” I mean those who experience that violence, often hide it out of fear of being further abused. As a younger male I could never tell anybody about what my girlfriend did to me because if I had I would have been laughed at. I know what the reaction of my friends would have been. They would have told me to slap her back and then they would have laughed at me and thought me less of a man because I got beat by a woman. And God forbid I went to the police station to report the assault. I’m not sure that my young and fragile male ego could have handled the total ridicule I would have experienced and so I, like so many others, remained silent about it.

Fourth, we aren’t aware of the violence that females perpetrate because “we” I mean everybody, minimize what females do. If you hit someone it’s obviously violent, but if you exclude someone from your social clique because you don’t like their looks and personality, or because they come from the wrong “demographic,” or because they aren’t “perky,” if you call them names or make them feel like shit inside, if you point your finger and laugh, that’s not violence. It’s the boys fighting in the yard that are violent. The girls engaged in psychological and emotional abuse simply aren’t on the radar.

Finally, we also have serious gender biases to contend with in this regard., especially around the emotions and sensitivity of males. Boys are supposed to be tough, right? Boys aren’t supposed to have emotions. Boys aren’t supposed to feel. Boys aren’t supposed to cry. Boys aren’t supposed to show weakness. Boys are supposed to “soldier up” and tough it out. In short, boys are supposed to castrate themselves emotionally and if they don’t, then they are feeble, gay, pussies. So if a boy is being beaten by a woman, or if a boy is crying because his mother hurt him, then it is the boy’s problem because he’s weak. If he would just toughen up and act like a man, everything would be ok. Frankly that’s a primitive load of gender based bullshit. What you end up with when you raise your boys like this is a society of emotionally castrated men who can’t connect with anybody, who can’t empathize with other living beings, and who are far more likely to engage in violent acts than they would have been if their natural childhood sensitivity had not been socialized out of them. And just in case you are not making the connection here, let me make it for you. Women are just as responsible for the violence that men perpetrate as the men are. When you hand your child the violent action figures, when you give them the toy weapons, when you belittle them for having emotions, when you tell them that boys don’t cry, when you invalidate their emotions and tell them to toughen up, when you cut off their loving and expressive nature, when you scream, yell, and beat, you are creating the next generation of violent males.

Think about it!

Females are the primary caregivers, after all.

Take a look at the homes and the daycares and the schools.

Females are the ones who care and socialize the children in the first decade or so of life. So unless we want to chalk it all up to genetics (i.e. men are naturally more violent), an argument that only flies in sociologically naive circles, women (not to mention teachers, schools, the media, our paramilitary and military organizations) are going to have to step up and take at least some responsibility for the violence we all experience.

Now I could go on and talk about a biased statistical and criminal system, how emotionally castrated men are created to feed the requirements of The System, and so on, but I won’t because I think I’ve made my point. What I will say at this point is that if you’re really interested in stopping violence in the family, then stop perpetrating it. Take a look at how you treat people in your life, the boys, the girls, the children, and your spouse. Take a look at what you teach them and how you expect them to behave and quit pretending you’re not part of the problem. We’re all part of the problem and until we take of our gender blinders off, until we stop organizing ourselves into groups, until we stop excluding each other from our clicky cliques, until we stop playing gender games, until we learn to stand together and face the problems we have created, we won’t be making any progress towards our goal of stopping the violence in our society. Instead we’ll just be perpetuating the myths and illusions, hiding the truth, and absolving ourselves of our responsibility .

—

p.s. Towards the goal of ending family violence I would like to invite males and females to share their accounts of the female violence they have experienced. Write it up and submit it to this journal where we will publish it. We won’t use your name (unless you want us to), and we may include your account in a future book on female violence. Help us end family violence by sharing with us the reality of your experience.

Related posts:

1. Where Are All the Women? How Traditional Structures of Academia Hinder Female University Professors.
2. Gendered Activities, gender difference, gender exclusion

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Introduction

You are watching network television. It is late evening, the time of Dallas and Falconcrest. Even more suddenly than most commercials begin, a gorgeous model appears on the screen, looking directly at you with those compelling, magazine-cover eyes. Her voice is friendly, direct, and in complete control. By the time you become aware of her, you have heard her say:

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

The line is carefully delivered. Its emphasis falls, lightly, on “beautiful,” almost as if, discarding “beautiful” as a reason, we might find other causes to hate her. But like most television, the line (which takes about two seconds) melts into the commercial, then flows into the ongoing dramas of power, passion, and perfection that haunt the television landscape.

But wait: That’s an astonishing statement–”Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” It begs a question. Is it, “Why would anyone hate a beautiful woman?” Not quite. More like: “Why would anyone hate a beautiful woman on a commercial?” More fully, I think the question is this: Can we find a way of looking at beauty, commercials, and hatred– that makes a link among them plausible?

I’d like to argue that we can.

Recent critical works on advertising employ a variety of approaches. In Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Williamson (1976) analyzes a collection of individual print ads for recurring themes and semiotic patterns. Her commentaries are often lively, provocative, literate, and insightful. Goffman (Gender Advertisements, 1979) brings an imposing sociological relativism to a selection of print ads, in order to illustrate how ads employ stylized versions of gestures and postures–”hyperritualized” gestures–to signal the relations between the sexes. Leymore’s Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (1975), caps a wide- ranging series of observations with a structuralist analysis of advertisements from print and television. Her discussion culminates in mathematical analyses of the basic “binary pairs” structuralists seek in myths–opposites like endogenous/exogenous, happiness/misery, nature/culture–and the results, while fascinating, are rarefied.

In Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, Ewen (1976) traces modern advertising as an essential function of the rise of mass production and consumption. Advertising is depicted as one of the main ways people’s minds are kept oriented to serve the structures of the capitalist system of production. Drawing from psychoanalysis, anthropology, and especially Marx, Jhally (The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, 1987) criticizes advertising as a system where products function like magical fetishes that help mass media and the marketplace replace traditional institutions.

In this paper, I draw upon these authors less for their technical methods than for the broad issues they hold in common.

• They all consider ads culturally significant.
• They all look for recurring structures in ads and deep structures beneath them: “[Advertising] obviously has a function, which is to sell things to us. But it has another function, which I believe in many ways replaces that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion. It creates structures of meaning.” (Williamson, 1978, 12).
• Though they consider ads a force influencing people, these authors (in varying degrees) emphasize that people participate in advertisements as active interpreters, not as pawns.
• For each of these authors, advertisements form some kind of system that must be approached as a whole: Any individual ad makes sense only against a larger backdrop, what Goffman calls “the realm of being of which the drama in every individual ad is but an instance” (22).

My methodology is much closer to literary analysis. It resembles the approach used by a fellow student of literature, Kenneth Burke, in The Rhetoric of Religion. It is an attempt to uncover relationships inherent in the structure of certain dominant strategies of advertising– and to use those to interpret “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” I take the line as a given, then try to create a context in which it makes sense.

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, I have not posted copies of any of the advertisements in the series, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful.” I hope the verbal descriptions help you imagine what they were like.

The Company She Keeps: Values in Commercials

The immediate context for any commercial consists of other commercials. Viewers apparently remember and compare commercials. That supposition underlies Frank Deford’s 1984 scrapbook on the Miller Lite commercials. On a deeper level, advertising–as Williamson and others have argued–forms a system of meaning. The TV viewer “sees all advertisements as one, or rather, sees their rules as applicable to one another and thus part of an interchangeable system.” (Williamson, 1978, 13). Many television commercials, for example, are loaded with images of ways to be. Watching them, you are virtually flooded by images of values, ideals, desirable states of being–such as liveliness, fun, pleasure, self confidence, contact with nature, family closeness, sex appeal, success, power, sophistication, popularity, patriotism, youth, adventure, superior knowledge–and, of course, beauty.

A commercial of this kind from the summer of 1987 shows vivid, masterly scenes of idealized family togetherness. Parents, children, and grandparents move together in a miniature drama of family closeness. They smile, they move close to one another, they look at one another with glowing fondness. Their world consists of 30 seconds of an idealized relationship. As the commercial goes on, M&Ms candy plays in increasing role in this togetherness, until it seems to be the cause, the motivating force behind the happiness of the participants. M&Ms share the stage with a nearly mythical moment of magical togetherness.

Many commercials follow a similar strategy: Images of desirable states of being are associated with products. In The Best Thing on Television: Commercials, Jonathan Price quotes advertising author Walter Taplin to illustrate how the approach is recognized and discussed in the advertising industry:

“Most of the things we want are not material but mental. We want states of mind. The advertiser, beginning with a material object, which is to be sold, suggests the states of mind which may be achieved by the purchaser” (50).

Here are some recent examples. When environmental awareness grew in the ’70s, tobacco companies presented glorious images of backpackers communing with nature (and with their cigarettes). As jogging became popular, many commercials featured images of happy joggers–associated with unlikely sponsors (such as banks) that had nothing to do with jogging. As our divorce-torn culture groped for the meaning of family in the early ’80s, idealized images of family togetherness, family reunions, and traditional extended families appeared on many commercials, associated with candy, diet cola, fast foods, and other products. Around a decade ago, billboards began to announce “Alive With Pleasure!” and implied that the product responsible for this happy state was Newport cigarettes. A current commercial states, “There’s someone exciting living inside you,” and offers a product to set that person free.

To the extent such a commercial is successful, it convinces us (on some level) that the product is a good way, the best way, or the only way to achieve the ideal state celebrated in the ad. For the ad to be successful, its product must become the link between our reality and the idealized image. Through such advertising, products become the connecting link between people and a wide range of personal, social, and psychological ideals.

Advertising and Sermons

Commercials repeatedly imply that products can connect us with almost any conceivable value. Watching them, you might conclude that virtually any desirable state of being can be attained, if only you purchase the right products. The seemingly innocent M&M commercial, for example, is structured to imply that M&Ms bring families together. The commercial implies that the ideal–family togetherness–comes to us by means of the power of the product.

Commercials of this kind employ a common rhetorical method: Present an ideal; convince your audience they need it but do not have it; convince them that you have the secret for moving from where they are to the desired state; tell them what to do next. This structure has frequently been used in sermons, especially at the revival meetings of my youth, where it appeared in this form: There is a God and heaven. Due to Adam’s fall and your own failings, you are separate, a sinner. Christ is the only link between you and God. Embrace Christ and you will enter the desired state of being saved. Refuse Christ and you will not only remain a sinner in this life, after death you will live forever in damnation. Now, since you clearly don’t want to burn in Hell forever, come down to the prayer rail and be saved. (See Table 1.)

In both cases, the method of presentation is designed to emphasize the importance of the mediator and the powerlessness of the listener. In both sermon and commercial, viewers are led to feel that they lack something, they are cut off from an ideal state of being which they can attain only through a mediator. Jhally (1987, 171) uses the term “fetishism” to describe consumer products in the same series of relationships: a desired state, a separation, a magical object that connects you, and a ritual for evoking that magic. In advertising, the product serves as mediator between us and the image of beauty–or other desired states of being. The product symbolically becomes the savior, the mediator, the fetish, the efficacy that promises to save us from the ordinary and elevate us to the company of those perfect beings whose images grace so many advertisements.

The Two Faces of the Ideal

In his study of gender in print ads, Goffman illustrated how the models in ads abstract certain gestures which reveal social relations, then project those gestures in simplified, amplified, “hyperritualized” form. Even animals are susceptible to selective, exaggerated versions of the normal. In his classic study of the herring gull, the ethologist Niko Tinbergen (1953) found that the the begging response of the newly hatched chick was triggered by a red spot on the bottom of the parent gull’s bill. Through an elaborate series of experiments, he pinpointed just which features (position of the red spot, color, contrast, color of bill, head color, head shape, shape of bill, lowness, position of bill, etc.) trigger the response. He was then able to construct a model which the chick preferred to the real thing! In other experiments, Tinbergen constructed stimuli other birds preferred above natural stimuli. An oystercatcher, for example, will prefer a giant, specially-painted model of an artificial egg to its own egg. Normal responses–even those vital to survival–can be subverted by symbolic stimuli that are more powerful than natural stimuli.

People are also susceptible to “supernormal sign stimuli” (as he called them in The Study of Instinct, 44). Tinbergen discussed one example: exaggerated sign stimuli derived from the face of the human baby. He observed that dolls, films, and the pet trade all employ idealized baby faces. Here is his characterization of the elements that go into the idealized baby face: It must have ” a small facial part and a large brain part of the head. Moreover, its cheeks must be fat and rounded. The baby’s crying, and its clumsy movements, are also necessary to make it really cute.” (Herring Gull, 223).

Advertising’s easy-looking images of hard-earned perfection may, in general, work like hypernormal stimuli. Such images certainly do not come easily. Diamant (1970) and Arlen (1980) documented the mind-boggling lengths to which a producer will go to achieve the fleeting images in 30- or 60- second commercial. No family can be as perfect as the one pictured. Few moments in life can have the immediacy of the AT&T commercial that took weeks to stage, shoot, and edit. We can seldom reach out and touch so vividly, so completely, so gorgeously, so ideally, as those immaculately staged images do in the ads. Technology amplifies the ads’ perfection. Anyone who has attended a demonstration of the Scitex graphics workstation can verify how easy it is for graphic designers to make magazine pictures even “more perfect”–deleting inconvenient portions of the picture, enhancing color balances, moving component parts of the image around, even importing images from other photographs–all without leaving a trace.

No one can look as good as the picture or video image of a fashion model–not even the models themselves, whose looks are for the camera. In life, many models are said to look startlingly skinny. A book like Cheryl Tieg’s The Way to Natural Beauty documents the immense effort required for a professional model to maintain her casual good looks. One line suggests the magnitude of the labor of being beautiful: “I hate spending even an hour fussing in front of a mirror in the morning” (19, italics added). As a result of her labors, she became one of those who embodied the ideals of beauty and presented them for women to emulate.

The supernormal images of perfection presented on the media (such as a photograph of Cheryl Tiegs) are worth some thought, because any kind of guiding image has a double nature. One the one hand, idealized images can uplift and give direction. In the pursuit of the unattainable, people attain great things. The uplifting ideal may be to love like Jesus, to manifest the compassion of the Buddha, to show the wisdom of a beloved Rabbi, to be the fastest runner in history, to raise a happy family, to look like Jane Fonda at 45, to live a balanced life, to bring about world peace, to end hunger, and so on. Even if you try but fail to attain such ideals, you can remain pointed in the right direction and ennobled by the effort. We belong to a culture guided by unattainable ideals: liberty, equality, happiness. Noble failure while pursuing great ideals is central to our striving, romantic spirit. For Americans, the hyperreal has often been merely a way of pointing us toward a future that has exceeded science fiction’s wildest dreams.

But idealized images are uplifting only when there is some way to move from where you are in the direction of the values implicit in the image. If there is nothing to connect you with the image, so that the ideal seems unattainable, you can feel cut off from it. If the ideal is important and the gap formidable, an unbridgeable gap may seem to loom before you. Instead of inspiring you to cross that gap, the separate, unattainable ideal begins to mock you and becomes a torment. In the worse case, you can become obsessed by an ideal, yet feel you have absolutely no means of moving from where you are to it, or even toward it. You can become stuck, powerless to move toward what you most desire.

By using idealized images that have no connection with the product, commercials may be promoting, not the joining of the viewer and the ideal, but just such a separation. Through certain strategies in commercials, we are led to desire various states of mind, yet we are misled in the means for achieving them. By depicting highly-valued states of being, yet offering no avenue to those states except consumer products, commercials make us the cognitive equivalent of sinners: cut off from the ideals we aspire to and mocked by the mediators that promise to take us to that heaven implied by television images. In showing us what to aspire to, but providing us means that will surely fail, advertising has given us a formula for despair.

“Despair” may sound like a harsh word to apply to a commercial, but I believe it is accurate. I am not implying that television viewers are all lying around in paralytic states of despondency. Rather, I want to suggest that certain advertising strategies provide the cognitive preconditions for a well-known state of being whose structure has been documented for centuries. Turning to an excellent summary from experts on the subject–the New Catholic Encyclopedia–we find this definition: Despair “signifies a positive act of will by which a man gives up the expectation of salvation because he considers that, in his own case at any rate, it is a thing too difficult to be achieved.” Because of my early training, I tend to turn to literature first for illustrations, and we find one of the most powerful depictions of despair in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, a play contemporaneous with the early works of Shakespeare. In his last scene, Faustus finds he must live out his part of the bargain and surrender his soul in exchange for his great knowledge.

O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop! Ah, my Christ!

Notice how he portrays his desired ideal–salvation–as something far away. Although he can vividly imagine the heaven of his desires, he finds himself with no way to attain it. He is unable to reach up toward that salvation, and no mediator reaches down to him. The God of love becomes transformed into a God of wrath:

Where is it now? ‘Tis gone. And see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows.
Mountains and hills, come, come , and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God….
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!

I am not calling upon these sources for their Christian perspective, but to point out how much the inner structure of despair resembles the way I have just analyzed advertising: one is enticed to desire an ideal, then cut off from all means of attaining it.

Advertising promotes despair of this kind, first, by surrounding us with images of unattainable perfection. Second, advertising promotes despair by implying that the product will deliver the ideal–when it can’t. In both cases, consumers look across a vast gulf at the promise of values–and find that the offered means (products we buy) cannot take us there. As one critic of advertising put it: “Sadness betrays the idyll [of advertising's more-than-perfect world] …. While busying themselves with feeding us, the ads are offering to appease a more unassuageable hunger, and failing to do so.” (Conrad, 118) We do not gain titillating encounters through DoubleMint Gum, a youthful dancer’s vitality through diet Pepsi, family closeness through Priazzo, or power and control through Z-cars. Despair–I am arguing–is a natural byproduct of the experience structured into the way advertising promises to deliver the values implicit in its hypernormal images.

Beauty may bring its own forms of despair. Beauty, and women’s relations to it, are far more complicated than just imitating the example set by gorgeous models in advertisements. What Ewen called “the pursuit of beauty through consumption” (1976, 181) has a discouraging effect on many women. Women have written of the way advertising has promised that “perfection is obtained on your grocer’s shelves. Perfection, cleanliness, godliness, gracious hospitality, and an adoring family are attained through the purchase of Lemon Fresh Joy and Drano.” (Scott, 199). Yet many women say the pursuit of such perfection has made them not more beautiful, but more ashamed of their bodies:

“Whole industries depend on selling us products through slick ads depicting ‘beautiful’ women, playing on our insecurities and fears of imperfection…. The media defines ‘looking good’ so narrowly that few of us ever feel we have made it… We always have to measure up to some image” (Boston Women’s Health Collective, 5).

Even for women who meet the prevailing standards for “looking good,” there are problems in what the poet William Butler Yeats called “the putting on of burdensome beauty.” In “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Yeats wished that she might be blessed with beauty, but in moderation– not enough to draw upon her the kind of destructiveness precipitated by the beauty of Helen of Troy. In their book on the politics of beauty Lakoff and Scherr summed up the burden of beauty this way:

“Women do not have power through beauty: beauty has power. Therein lies the paradox. Men–whose judgments are what give beauty what power it has–envy and resent women for their supposed ‘power’ through beauty over men’s hearts and minds (and pocketbooks). Women fear the dependence upon men, since only men can unlock the ‘power’ of beauty and make it function to woman’s advantage. Men are angry at women for possessing a power which, in fact, women do not possess; if anything, it possesses them.” (279)

Arguing from a psychoanalytic framework, Holbrook in The Masks of Hate (1972) claims that “the glamorous images in the mass media” are manifestations of the “intense unconscious hatred of woman” that is “expressed…widely in our culture” (41).

Beauty has not always seemed so complicated. From the time of the Greeks till the early 20th century, philosophers and poets connected beauty with such glorious ideals as truth and harmony. Plato considered beauty “a self-subsisting idea shining through bodies, laws, and knowledge itself. Every beautiful thing partakes of this eternal oneness of beauty. Beauty and goodness are found together…; in fact, they are identical” (New Catholic Encyclopedia). For Plato, as for Dante, such ideals were the guiding lights that illuminated existence. One has only to remember the conclusion of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn:”

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

In contrast, listen to the words used about beauty by the modern commentators we have quoted: vacuum, depersonalized, power, paradox, envy, fear, dependence, advantage, angry, possession–and hate. We have travelled a long road to come back to that commercial for hair conditioner with such a vocabulary in mind.

Let’s continue our discussion of the way advertising uses idealized images, by focusing on the term most central to our commercial: “envy.”

The Two Faces of Envy

Near the end of Ways of Seeing, John Berger describes advertising in terms of envy. Advertising “proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more…. [Advertising] persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour.” And advertising (he uses the British term, “publicity”) “is the process of manufacturing glamour.” (131) Advertising, he concludes, is about the solitary happiness that comes from being envied by others.

In this sense, envy implies the admiration of others. This “envy” suggests that others might covet your possessions, looks, manner, etc., and want to be like you. Surely Berger is right in a way; advertisers must want us to want to be like those beautiful people in the ads. But envy has a dark side which has largely been lost to twentieth-century thought. For at least a thousand years, a distinction has been made among envy, coveting, and jealousy. You are jealous to protect something you already have. You covet what you want but do not have. Coveting and jealousy are minor sins. But since medieval times, envy has been considered a major term for identifying the causes of human suffering. In many versions of the Seven Deadly Sins, envy took first or second place. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, from envy come “hatred, calumny, detraction, and many types of malevolent behavior.” In Purgatorio, Canto XIII, Dante meets Sapia, whose punishment for malicious envy–she rejoiced to see her countrymen lose in battle–was to have her eyelids sewn shut with steel wire. Plotting the death of Cassio, Iago tossed off these chilling lines: “If Cassio do remain,/ He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That makes me ugly.” (Othello, V.I.18- 20). Shakespeare’s audience would almost certainly have recognized this as an instance of envy.

Modern writings on envy are rare, but the German sociologist, Helmut Schoeck, has produced a rich, scholarly volume on the subject: Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. In his review of what great thinkers have said about envy, he quotes Nietzsche’s compelling definition: “When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do, they exclaim angrily, ‘May the whole world perish!’ This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is, ‘If I cannot have something, no one is to have anything, no one is to be anything!’” (179) Schoeck argues that envy is a universal drive that ranges from a spiteful Schadenfreude (malicious glee at another’s misfortune) to horrible acts of mutilation and murder for no other reason than that the perpetrator felt belittled by the accomplishments of the victim.

I covet when I want something I do not have; I can covet my neighbor’s wife, car, house, talents, or achievements. Coveting, indeed, may be one of the virtuous vices of a competitive economy; but there is nothing virtuous about envy. Coveting says, “He has it; I want it.” Envy, though, says: “If I can’t have it, nobody can.”

Envy is frustrated desire turned destructive. Envy is what leads a child to break another child’s favorite toy, or a boss to frustrate a talented employee. In the play and film, Amadeus, Salieri enacts a highly theatrical version of envy as he sets out to destroy Mozart for effortlessly writing music far greater than all Salieri’s labors can produce. Impotent to attain the ideal, the envious person feels destructive toward it. Like despair, envy derives from the separation of the person from the object of desire, combined with a sense that one is powerless to attain what is desired (Schoeck, 17). In envy, the urge to reach out becomes the urge to destroy.

Envy seems to be a difficult concept for the modern mind. In their recent collection of wise quotes on almost every subject, Good Advice, for example, William Safire and Leonard Safir confuse envy with coveting and jealousy. I have given up finding the meaning of envy in Britannica III. In November, 1987, Harper’s ran a parody in which a different agency produced an ad for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Many of the sins were represented both keenly and humorously. The advertisement based on envy, however, left one with the feeling that envy was an amplified form of griping. Going back as far as the turn of the century, Schoeck consulted decades of American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology, and other prominent journals–without finding “a single instance of ‘envy,’ ‘jealousy,’ or ‘resentment’ in the subject indexes.” (9) Anyone unconvinced of the reality of envy will find the case argued well by Schoeck. It is remarkable that such an ancient and powerful concept can have disappeared from the moral landscape of educated people. It is even more remarkable that a television commercial could bring it back to mind.

[Added Oct. 16, 2007]

Some recent images document the way “envy” is frequently used in a positive, even assertive way, as if to say, “This is something really good. Don’t you wish you had it?”

Advertising as Mythology

From a variety perspectives, different writers have concluded that advertising is the consumer culture’s version of mythology. Such is the theme of Leymore’s book, Hidden Myth:

“No society exists without some form of myth. Once this is realized, it is not very surprising that a society which is based on the economy of mass production and mass consumption will evolve its own myth in the form of the commercial. Like myth it touches upon every facet of life, and as a myth it makes use of the fabulous in its application to the mundane.” (156)

The sociologist Peter Berger, not quick to embrace the structuralist approach of Leymore, defines myth as “a conception of reality that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience by sacred forces” (1967, 110). A few hours’ worth of television will show you “sacred forces” at work transforming people and products, working magic, causing cats to sing, rescuing victims from halitosis, body odor, and other fates worth than death–all on commercials which are strong candidates to meet Berger’s definition of myth.

In order to understand why the makers of a commercial would want to evoke hate and envy, we must recall a central function of myths. In his book comparing Piaget and Levi-Strauss, Howard Gardner wrote:

“Myths are designed to deal with problems of human existence which seem insoluble; they embody and express such dilemmas in a coherently structured form, and so serve to render them intelligible. Through their structural similarity to given ‘real world’ situations, myths establish a point of repose or equilibrium at which men can come to grips with the crucial components of the problem, and become aware of the ‘fix’ they are in. Thus, a myth is both intellectually satisfying and socially solidifying.” (148)

A sharp summary of this view comes from Jonathan Price, at the end of his anecdotal study, The Best Thing on TV: Commercials:

“Myths [and commercials] also help us express and control in a safe way, impulses that could potentially tear our society apart…. They arouse our deepest impulses toward sex, violence, and faith, and they express these instincts while at the same time keeping that expression aesthetic, rather than physical, thus saving our society from the potential chaos of orgies and massacre.” (158, 162)

To see evidence for this kind of mythology at work, turn to the magazine version of this television commercial–as it appeared, say, in the May, 1988, Elle. On the left, a full-page, color picture of the model’s gorgeous face bears the bold headline: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” Facing her is a page containing a block of text and a small black and white photo of the same model looking like a wet puppy: her hair stringy, disheveled, and (especially) dull, half her face pleading, the other half pained and shadowed. The viewer of this ad does not need to ponder an envious attack upon the gorgeous model; the attack has been accomplished for you in the small picture. It is a ritual, surrogate defacement. One is given the satisfaction of seeing her defaced, without having to feel the full power of envy, violence, and guilt. The print version of the commercial supports the possibility that the ad was designed to arouse and appease the specific emotion of destructive envy. From this perspective, the commercial acts as a surrogate myth for viewers whose cultural myths are not adequate to help them identify and deal with the socially destructive emotion of envy.

Beauty, Hate, and Religion

Now that I have reached a neat conclusion, I have to complicate things by emphasizing that envy is only part of the story, and there is another way of looking at “myth.” In The Rhetoric of Religion, Kenneth Burke analyzed the opening chapters of Genesis as the sequential spinning-out of a series of relationships that were essentially simultaneous–a horizontal version of a vertical story, so to speak. Burke wrote, “‘Myth’ is characteristically a terminology of quasi-narrative terms for the expression of relationships that are not intrinsically narrative, but ‘circular’, or ‘tautological.’” (1970, 258) The context in which I want to view “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” is mythic in Burke’s technical sense. It is a linear, narrative version of what I believe to be a set of cognitive and emotional structures inherent in the kind of advertising we have been discussing.

I am proposing a mAP Test, That locates beauty, advertising and hatred in a relationship to one another. Hate, on this map, can be reached from several directions. The fullest route comes through envy, after passing through the despair caused by believing in media images that offer inadequate means for attaining the ideals they depict. Beauty–with highlights in its conditioned hair–sits among those unattainable ideal images. (See Figure 1). After finding out ten thousand times that the product does not provide the psychological reward implied in the commercial, why should one not hate the teasing, unattainable image of the beautiful model who makes the promises?

If we hate her, it may not be for being intrinsically beautiful in her own right, but because she is part of a conspiracy–a conspiracy, among other things, to appropriate our idea of what is beautiful, along with other ideals, values, and longings–and tell us that only by consuming products can we attain them. We may hate her because, being “beautiful,” she reminds us of all the values that we–as good viewers, bombarded by yearnings, yet left with no instructions but to consume–are cut off from. We may hate her not for being a sexual tease, but for being part of a system that teases and frustrates our need for valued states of being–such as family togetherness, community, self-confidence–and beauty.

There may, then, be reasons to hate her–”her” being the image in the commercial. Hate, however, is but one node in a web of reactions–and a particularly difficult place to settle. You might be able to sustain hatred if you had a specific object: something, someone to become the hated center of your life, the great counter-motivating force. But less-focussed hatred is nearly impossible to sustain; it leads past the beautiful models and their beautiful products to a soul-wearying exhaustion–fatigue–inertia. No doubt people arrive at apathy through other routes; but this pathway will suffice: from impossible ideals, through disillusion and envy to the exhaustion that lies on the other side of a wearying and impotent hatred.

Because products do not provide the kind of psychic payoff promised by the imagery of advertising, we are left to doubt whether anything can. If we follow this doubt, we wind up contemplating the state of mind in which a black hole surrounds almost every product like a ghostly negative of its radiance–the black hole of failed promise.

And into this black hole, dug by advertising’s exploitation of so many ideal images, steps any religion that promises to cut through the cycle of idolatry and connect us with the one great ideal that transcends all others: God, immortality, cosmic consciousness, enlightenment, the spirit world, the deep self, the light, or whatever name It has. In using techniques that are fundamentally religious, advertising inadvertently advertises religion.

Conrad (1982, 117), Jhally (1987, 197, 203), Williamson (1978, 12) and others have plainly labelled advertising a form of religion. Jhally cites a marvelous passage from drama critic Martin Esslin:

“The TV commercial, exactly as the oldest known types of theater, is essentially a religious form of drama which shows us human beings as living in a world controlled by a multitude of powerful forces that shape our lives…. The moral universe…is dominated by a sheer numberless pantheon of numberless forces, which literally reside in every article of use or consumption, in every institution of daily life. If the winds and waters, the trees and brooks of ancient Greece were inhabited by a vast host of nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and other local and specific deities, so is the universe of the TV commercial. The polytheism that confronts us here is thus a fairly primitive one, closely akin to animistic and fetishistic beliefs…We may not be conscious of it, but this is the religion by which most of us actually live, whatever our more consciously and explicitly held beliefs and religious persuasions may be. This is the actual religion that is being absorbed by our children almost from the day of their birth.” (Esslin, 1976, 271)

If you consider the resemblance between advertising and religion, this paper’s use of traditionally religious moral terminology–such as envy and despair–will appear less arbitrary. Considered in terms of religion, advertising encourages people to believe that the most vivid and appealing ideals of our culture can be easily attained, if you just find the right product–or, by extension, the right savior, philosophy, church, guru, cult–or even drug. (I first made the connection between advertising and drug psychology before a U. S. Senate subcommittee in 1971.)

That is a disturbing possibility; but another possibility is even more disturbing. Years ago, Hayakawa pointed out how “poetic language is used so constantly and relentlessly for the purposes of salesmanship that it has become almost impossible to say anything with enthusiasm or joy or conviction without running into the danger of sounding as if you were selling something.” (1972, 223) Could we be producing a generation that distrusts ideals altogether, because the most powerful, forceful, convincing presentations of those ideals occur on TV commercials–where the ideals are prostituted in the service of sales? Are we creating a disillusioned generation? A generation that will have difficulty not hating beauty of the kind used to manipulate and disappoint them in advertising? And will they also hate being delicately overpowered by real beauty when they encounter it in the world? After being nibbled to death by little broken promises, will people continue to be able to hope, have faith, set goals, and believe in something beyond themselves?

In view of such questions, is it enough to reach the neutral conclusion–as some recent authors have — that advertising is merely a “modern myth,” serving the same function as the mythology of traditional cultures? (cf. Leymore). That approach fails to reckon with the possibility that a mythological system may be debased, manipulative, life-negative, or one among several competing value-systems. If advertising is a genuine mythological system (which I doubt), it is surely a myth that has failed in its primary responsibility to give personal identity, community, and spiritual meaning to those it reaches.

The Broken Connection

Figure 1 depicts the thesis of this paper as a network that pinpoints just how I understand the line, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” to make sense in the context of advertising’s use of idealized images of values people desire.

http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow/Hate/HateFig1.gif

This figure is based on larger conviction that human experience has structures that are shared everywhere–in this case, structures deriving from the mind’s inherent idealizing tendency–or, on a more subtle level, the act of categorization that underlies language.Throughout this paper, I have been implicitly arguing from the conviction that the human imagination and human emotions have a high degree of structure, and that structure underlies everything we experience. This approach stands in sharp contrast to the post-modern belief that human experience is local and consists of an opaque surface that prohibits us from finding such structures.

As you can see, however, I have not been able to pull all the ramifications of even a single line on a single television commercial into a tight focus. If this were a large topic, I would feel bad about reaching such a diffuse conclusion; but the small moments of daily life are, I think, the most complicated to explain.

To summarize: From what appears in advertising today, I conclude that creative, resourceful, insightful, and unscrupulous people constantly try to discover what others value most — then look for some way to hitch their product to that star. There need be no connection whatsoever.

It is precisely this breaking of the connection between values and means that is my real subject. By their very nature, few products can help us attain the ideals that are “visually promised” in so many commercials–ideals such as family togetherness, personal power, self-esteem, sociability, authoritativeness, security, sex appeal, and clear orientation in a confusing world. The promiscuous coupling of so many products with so many ideals promotes a deep confusion. Williamson called the results a kind of surrealism:

“All ads are surreal in a sense: they connect disparate objects in strange formal systems, or place familiar objects in locations with which they have no obvious connection. We are so familiar with perfume bottles haunting desert islands and motor cars growing in fields of buttercups that their surreal qualities go unremarked. (Dali’s ‘Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach’ could be the description of an everyday advertisement.” (1986, 69)

Advertising is a diverse field, of course, and not all commercials exploit ideal images or imply that products will deliver values. But commercials driven by value-laden images which are unrelated to the product may be alienating us from the very values they exploit, confusing us about how to attain those values, laying the groundwork for despair, resentment, and apathy, and even prompting us to turn outside the culture to seek ideals that do not seem corrupted. Perhaps advertising will make Buddhists of us all.

Head-down in the midst of this tangled web hangs hate–hatred of the product that fails to link us to the ideal, hatred of anything that reminds us of the tormentingly unattainable ideal, hatred of ourselves for still yearning for the exhaustingly unattainable ideal, hatred of commercials for exploiting our deepest yearnings, and hatred of those supernormally beautiful people who promise us values but deliver only products.

And yet, at the heart of this hatred lies the remarkable depth and simplicity of human longing–a longing for life, ideals, values, vitality, and love. A longing for connection. For beauty. It is a longing that projects itself optimistically through symbols, images, and idealized concepts, then draws a world together in the spaces between what can be imagined and what is. It is in those spaces–cosmic spaces silently inhabiting our smallest thoughts–that we hear the resonance of “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” And it is in those very spaces that we can create other relations between ourselves and the unattainable images of advertising, media, and culture.

And we can create a relation other than hate. Indeed, our main alternative is to create–to create a context more generous and expansive than the inevitable, controlling simplifications of the images we inherit, and even of the images we make.

For, contrary to the commercial, we are not the haters of unattainable beauty, we are the creators of ideals of beauty, creators of ideals of all kinds. And in us lives the power to translate those ideals into reality. We are not, as the commercial seems to presume, separated from fulfillment by an unbridgeable gap and despairingly dependent on a missing messiah. We are the gap. We are the longing. And we are the bridge.

The real challenge is to look knowingly–even affectionately–at media, advertising, culture, conventions, and all human forms, and reclaim ourselves as participants and co-creators in the world of images that limits us as it sets us free.

Conclusion

In discussing a single line on a single television commercial, I have sought to provide the most fundamental requirement for interpreting meaning: a context that makes sense of it (Douglas, 1970, 37). Unfortunately, there is no procedure for identifying the correct, best, or even a good context by which to bring meaning to a given event. But because the line turns on “hate” and because the commercial uses some of the strategies that have led critics to call advertising a form of religion, perhaps terms from the traditional moral vocabulary have provided an appropriate context for interpreting the commercial. I have considered the commercial a “mythic” way for ritually discharging envy, and I have argued that the neglected universal emotions of despair, envy, and hate are potential byproducts of the cognitive strategies employed in certain types of advertising.

This paper has sought to open up a fleeting, seemingly trivial moment–a single line of a single television commercial–in order to glimpse the intricate symbolic resonances that we share under the guise of ordinary reality.

Bombarded by commercial images that imply that using a certain product will cause them to become as suave and vivacious as the beautiful woman selling it, viewers have good occasion to develop destructively envious feelings toward these idealized and unattainable images. On the television documentary, Quest for Beauty, Nina Blanchard, “the most famous model agent in Hollywood,” discussed the hostility professional models arouse: “There is anger about beauty….I think that beautiful women provoke anger when they walk into a room.” A closer term might be “envy.” If you feel immune from envy, think how satisfying it is when the cover of the National Enquirer shows one of those impossibly gorgeous celebrities caught looking like a drunken pig!

On the simplest level, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” is the model’s plea to be free from the destructive envy of the viewer–the kind of envy that expresses itself in a range from catty remarks to the recent slashing of a model’s face on a New York street. It echoes the plea of every person of beauty, talent, wealth, luck, or distinction–the plea for protection against the “levelling” violence of envy. It may even reflect the viewer’s fear of being envied for becoming more beautiful.

We are now able to ask the central question: Why would an advertisement try to arouse such a difficult emotion in viewers? The first answer to this question takes us into the interpretation of advertising as mythology.

References

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“That must be them.” Petra took one hand off the steering wheel and pointed to a group of soldiers about two hundred meters away, standing along our road next to a high chainlink fence topped with barbed wire.

War, what is it good for...

Traffic was light, but Petra said, “I don’t want any other cars around.” She pulled off the road and stopped. “Get everything ready.”

I crawled into the back of the car and opened the rear hatch to give access to the interior and to raise the license plate out of sight. We wore caps and sunglasses to be less recognizable.

When the road was empty, she started driving again. We approached the soldiers, who were walking in the grass, stopping often to pick things off the ground and put them in sacks they were dragging.

“There’s Rick.” Petra slowed and drove along the shoulder. A man turned his head at the sound of our car crunching gravel, dropped his bag, and ran towards us with a slight limp. While the guards shouted for him to stop, I thrust my arm out, grabbed Rick’s hand, and pulled. He lunged forward and dived into the open hatch, banging his leg on the edge. A guard was swearing and groping at the holster on his belt. Rick scrambled in, knocking off his glasses, and Petra floored the gas. Our spinning tires hurled gravel behind us then squealed over the pavement. The car slid halfway across the road before Petra brought it under control, and we sped away.

One guard was waving his pistol at us but not aiming it, and the other was punching buttons on a cell phone. Some of the detention soldiers were clapping and shouting in envious congratulations, others just stood staring.

I closed the hatch as Petra rounded a corner and headed for the autobahn. Rick lay on the floor trembling and gasping, holding his leg in pain. I gripped him on the shoulder to steady him. “Way to go! You’re on your way out of the army.”

His tension exploded into laughter, then tears. “Thanks, thanks,” he spluttered.

“It’s not over yet,” Petra said.

Rick breathed deeply, scrinched his eyes to block the tears, and clenched his fists. “Not going back.”

I tried to calm my own tremors.

Petra drove away from the base through a section of fast-food franchises and striptease bars that bordered it. Rick put his glasses back on; bent at the bow, they sat crookedly on his nose. We put up the rear seat so we could sit without attracting attention, then waited at the stoplight by the autobahn entrance for thirty seconds that seemed like ten minutes, surrounded by other cars full of American soldiers and German civilians, none of whom noticed us. Finally Petra roared up the onramp. German autobahns have no speed limits, and soon the Volkswagen was going flat out at 160 kilometers per hour.

From a small suitcase I pulled out civilian clothes for Rick, and he started stripping off his uniform. “Last time I’ll ever wear this thing.”

As he took off his shirt, I got a whiff of the sour stench of fear, which I knew well from my own time in the military. He stuffed the fatigues into a trash bag, then put on corduroy pants and a cotton sweater. Now he looked like a young German, but with the buzz cut hair, almost like a neo-Nazi. I set my cap on his head.

At the first rest stop we pulled in and parked beside a van. I gave him the suitcase and a wallet with a thousand euros in it. We shook hands, then hugged. I clapped him on the back. He got out of the car and kissed Petra on the cheek, crying again as he thanked us. With a combination of a glare and a grin, he pushed the bag with his uniform into a garbage can. I got into the front seat of the VW; Rick got into the back of the van, giving us a V sign. The van pulled away, headed for Sweden, where Rick would apply for asylum.

Petra re-entered the autobahn, much slower now because she too was crying, quietly, on a resolute face. “He’s out of the war,” she said in her throaty German accent. “No one’s going to kill him, and he’s not going to kill anybody.” She took the next exit, then wended back over country roads towards her home. “Now I’m exhausted.”

“Me too, all of a sudden,” I said. “This one was hairy. We broke more laws than usual.”

“Good. Such laws need to be broken. I’ll make us some coffee.”

Petra had been the first of our group to meet with Rick. She worked in Caritas, the German Catholic social agency, and a priest had brought him to her office. Rick was absent without leave, AWOL, from the army, determined not to go back, but didn’t know what to do. He’d heard from another soldier that the Catholic Church sometimes helped, so he went there.

The priest was in too public a position to personally do much, but he introduced him to Petra because she was active in Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement. The priest and the social worker had a tacit “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement about her counseling work with soldiers. She didn’t volunteer information, and he didn’t pry.

Petra had various approaches to freeing soldiers. She could help them apply for conscientious objector status, but these days CO applications were usually turned down by the military. She had a degree in clinical psychology and was skilled at teaching GIs how to get psychological discharges, to act the right amount of crazy and handle the trick questions the military shrinks would throw at them. But now those too were usually denied. The military needed bodies — didn’t care if they were crazy.

If neither of these methods worked, and if the soldiers were desperate to get out, she would help them desert, a drastic step because it risked years in prison for them and major hassles for her.

Petra has never been arrested, but based on experiences of others in our group, she could expect to be charged with accessory to military desertion and with aiding and abetting a fugitive. The court process would be a severe drain on the energy and finances of both her and our group, but it was unlikely that she’d actually go to prison. With public opinion already so opposed to this war, the German government wouldn’t want to risk the protests. But she’d probably get a year on probation, lose her job, and have trouble finding another one.

Why did she take the risk? Petra’s grandfather had been an SS trooper, the kind of Christian who unquestioningly supports authority. His children reacted by becoming atheists. Petra became the kind of Christian who opposed authority, including the church hierarchy. She felt stopping war was more important than her personal security.

When she met Rick, she was impressed by his sincerity and also his desperation. He told her he’d got married after high school to a co-worker at a restaurant, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who was a few years older. They wanted to have children but couldn’t raise them on minimum wage. He wanted to become an electrical engineer but couldn’t afford college. The army’s offer of tuition aid and electronics training was better than life at Pizza Hut, so he enlisted in 2001.

The plan was that she’d work in the towns where he was stationed. After his four-year hitch, he’d go to college while she continued to work, and after college when he had a good job, they’d have kids. Eight years seemed like a long time to get started in life, but by then he’d have a real career.

After 9-11, the army needed infantry troops more than electronic specialists, so they took away his needle-nosed pliers, gave him an M-16, and flew him to Afghanistan. First they made him excavate corpses from the collapsed caves of Tora Bora, full of the reek of rotting meat, hoping to find bin Laden’s. Then they sent him on night ambush missions along the Pakistan border: staring out from a machine gun bunker with goggles that made everything glow green and yellow, shooting anything that moved after dark, shipping the bodies out in the morning on the supply helicopter, still hoping to find bin Laden. Finally he was assigned to round up men from the villages around Kandahar and send them to interrogation camps. But there weren’t many men in the villages. They were either dead or in the mountains, and the army didn’t have enough troops to comb the mountains.

After eight months his wife divorced him.

In one of the villages an old woman walked by them with her goat. The goat wore a pack basket. The woman reached down, patted the goat, and blew them all up.

Rick woke up lying in a helicopter surrounded by dead and wounded friends. He felt he’d become one of his ambush victims being shipped out. The army would be disappointed to find out he wasn’t bin Laden.

It turned out later the woman was the mother of two sons who had been killed by the Americans.

With shrapnel wounds, a fractured leg, and a twisted spine, Rick was evacuated to the US hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where after five months of treatment he was pronounced fit for active duty and given orders for Iraq. By then he’d heard about Iraq from other patients. He panicked, went AWOL, then met Petra.

She helped him clarify his options. He could apply for conscientious objector status or a psychological discharge, but with orders into a combat zone, his chances of success were nil. But if he deserted, there was a good chance that Sweden would accept his application for asylum.

Rick told Petra later that what finally settled his decision to desert was learning that in Sweden the state helps pay college expenses. You don’t have to join the military and kill people just to get an education.

But before our group could make arrangements, Rick got arrested for AWOL and assigned to the detention barracks. If they’d known he was planning to desert, they would’ve locked him in the stockade, but simple AWOL has become too widespread for that. He was busted down two ranks and assigned to sixty days hard labor, at the end of which he’d be sent to Iraq still under detention.

After visiting him in the detention barracks, Petra told us he seemed like a man on death row. His psychological condition was deteriorating so rapidly that she was afraid he would kill himself rather than go back to war. He begged her to try to get him out.

The current work detail for the detention soldiers was twelve hours a day of picking up trash along the fence at the boundary of the base. They’d finished inside the base and had just started working on the outside, a group of ten detainees with two guards.

Petra and I wouldn’t have risked the snatch inside the base, but we were pretty sure the guards wouldn’t fire their pistols outside the base for fear of “collateral damage.” Shooting the local population is bad for public relations.

I alerted our sanctuary network in Germany and Sweden and arranged the logistics to get Rick into a new life.

Since I’m a US citizen, if I got arrested for helping soldiers desert, I’d be sent back to the homeland for trial and probably to prison. It’s worth the risk to me, though.

I do this work because my past is similar to Petra’s grandfather’s. I was in the Special Forces in Panama and Vietnam. I’d joined the Green Berets to write a book about war. During our search and destroy operations, I kept telling myself, “I’m just here gathering material for a novel.” But our deeds have consequences that affect us and others regardless of why we do them. I’m still dealing with the repercussions from my involvement, and my work in the military resistance movement is a way of atoning for it.

I’ve met many veterans who never saw combat but still feel a burden of guilt. Just being part of an invading force and abusing another country pollutes the soul. Under the hyperbole, there’s some truth in Kurt Tucholsky’s statement, “All soldiers are murderers.” The military exists to kill people, and everyone in it contributes to that. Even as civilians, we finance it.

Having got medals for combat, I know that the real heroes are the people like Rick who refuse to go, who stand up to the military and say no. If they’re caught, the government punishes them viciously because they’re such a threat to its power. Deserters and refusers are choosing peace at great danger to themselves. I wish I’d been that morally aware and that brave.

When this book is published, I’ll have to stop actively participating in desertions and will have to break off direct contact with our group. Once I go public, my e-mails and phone calls will probably be routed through Langley, Virginia, and that would endanger our whole operation.

Ironically enough, when I left the Special Forces, the CIA offered me a job. If I had accepted it, I could now be that G-13 civil servant who is perusing the messages of dissidents, trying to find ways to neutralize us. The road not taken.

Now living in Germany, I can see how important it is to resist such things in their early stages. In the 1930s many Germans were afraid to oppose their government as it became increasingly vicious, hoping it wouldn’t get too bad, hoping they’d be spared, hoping it would end soon, but then bitterly regretted their passivity after it was too late.

Better to go down resisting. Better yet to change it while we still can. It’s clear now that Obama isn’t really going to change things, so we have to do it ourselves.

*

RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War presents the first-person experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Just released by Trine Day, it’s a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional ways.

William T. Hathaway is a former Special Forces officer turned peace writer and activist. His other books include A WORLD OF HURT (Rinehart Foundation Award), CD-RING, and SUMMER SNOW. He is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. A selection of his work is available at www.peacewriter.org.

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I very much enjoyed the money book. Your explanation of economics is refreshingly clear. The concepts you present are particularly important now, since the corporate media are avoiding any critical analysis of the basic assumptions underlying the economic system and any consideration of alternative systems and are focusing instead on the elite insider debate over superficial reforms. Your book is also important now because many new-age folks don’t know much about economics and accept capitalism as a given. The current crisis has challenged their complacency, and your analysis will help them rethink their assumptions within a spiritual context.

A grounded and revealing analysis of the nature, function, and the social, political, and economic costs of debtRemoves the black box, obtuse jargon, and complicated science to  reveal the ugly realities of capitalist economics that lie within. A personal, critical, and perfectly executed  introduction to the realities of capitalist  economics.

Related posts:

1. Capitalism 101: The Money Tree

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A paper submitted to Sociology 460: Sociology of Information Technology

It’s Monday morning, 5:30AM and I am awake. I go for a run, have breakfast, feed the dogs, have a shower, get ready for the day and then sit down on the couch with a cup of coffee, Canada AM and my laptop. I have one hour between 8AM and 9AM to catch up on the news and personal things before work. Within that hour, I check both my email accounts responding where necessary but for the most part cleaning out junk mail and funny emails from friends. I check out Facebook, send a birthday greeting, send a couple pokes, invent a witty and interesting status, check my inbox and any comments and then sign out quickly in case someone wants to chat. Now I have a few minutes for twitter, where I find out someone I don’t really know is doing something quite boring, so I repost my status from Facebook and sign out. In the meantime, my computer has signed me into MSN where I get to discuss the divorce of someone I knew in high school, while I respond to four other people who have a sudden need to chat with me. All the while, my blackberry is beeping. My hour now is almost up. I have heard nothing about the day’s events, my coffee is cold, I have been up for three and a half hours and I feel like I have worked a full day.

I remember longingly the days when I could sit for an hour, drink a hot coffee and watch the news. There were no interruptions, nothing in need of my immediate attention. An hour, left to my own devices. Only three short years ago when I had no laptop, my email contacts totaled ten people and I had no idea how to text. Unfortunately, that is not today and my hour is over so, I pack up my laptop and blackberry and it is off to work. In my office, I turn on the office computer and set up my laptop, which again signs me into MSN. I really need to figure out how to stop that I think as I hear the beep signaling someone wants to chat. I ignore them while I check more emails. I muddle through the morning, checking my inbox during periodic lulls, while MSN beeps in one ear and my blackberry in the other. Lunch arrives and I contemplate skipping it in order to catch up, but I am tired, hungry and ready to snap. I head out for lunch blackberry in hand, because I cannot imagine how I will survive without a phone for one hour.

Upon returning to my desk, it dawns on me that I have not actually spoken to anyone today and even the telemarketing call was an electronic recording. When did it become the norm to have instant electronic contact with everyone and no actual face-to-face interaction? The afternoon passes in much the same fashion, only now the emails are coming faster than I can check them. Around 3:30PM, I give up and finally turn off both computers. The dogs need a walk, as do I, so I pocket my blackberry and head outside. I have to resist the urge to check the texts coming in, but I know that a second of inattention will lead to very naughty behaviour on the part of the dogs. Therefore, I pretend I do not hear it and try to take a few deep breaths and unwind. After our walk, I quickly make dinner, than head to the gym for an hour truly free of technology and contact with real people. Coming home, I wish I could just sit in a quiet house and read, but I walk in and the television is on. For the next three hours, I sit in front of the television, with my laptop. Another day has passed and I have had maybe two hours, without some form of technology beckoning me. Tomorrow morning I get to get up and do the whole thing over again and I wonder how long I can do this. When will it be too much?

This morning I longed for three years ago and now I wish I could go back to high school where my only contact with a computer was the Commodore 64 in the school’s new computer lab. Of course, its functions were limited; this was before the internet, before email, before inkjet printers. We were fascinated though with the poor quality games, the ability to make banners and flyers and the potential computers promised us. What a wonderful world it would be, if at the push of a button we could access any information we required and have instantaneous contact with the people in our lives. Oh yes, the promise that computers offered was endless. A paperless world; where everything was stored in the memory of a machine, available at the press of a button. That was what we envisioned computers could do for us. We were naively certain, at the end of the 1980’s, that technology would greatly enhance our lives, connecting us with others across the world, decreasing our workload and giving us more time for leisure. Some of that promise has been fulfilled and today we are able to keep in touch with family and friends, no matter where they are. We can share pictures and emails instantaneously. The world has become a much smaller place in the past 20 years. It has also become a much busier place.

That is perhaps the greatest change that technology has brought to mine and I am sure other’s lives. In my childhood, there were no computers, no cell phones and no answering machines. My parent’s television had three channels and it did not matter because we spent our spare time outside. We played with our friends, read books and talked to people. If a family member lived far away, you phoned them, wrote them a letter or made the drive to see them. For me, computers, internet and technology have increased the workload I am responsible for in a day. Not only do I need to keep up with increasing emails but also I am also permanently tied to my phone even when I am out for a walk with the dogs. The only hour I have that’s phone free is when I am at the gym. That is my greatest struggle with technology, the lack of free, personal time. I have tried to take breaks where I turn off the technology but it tends to create more problems than it solves. Eventually I must go back and the amount of information waiting for me is overwhelming. Even turning off the internet and cell phone does not disconnect me from technology. There is television with hundreds of channels, my car with a GPS and IPod jack and the dozens of gadgets that clutter up the house. There really is no escaping technology.

Along with the added workload of maintaining email and social networking, there is an increase in the electronic gadgets that clutter up our lives. When I left home for college in 1991, I had the necessities a bed, a couch, a table, a television, a VCR, a box of books and clothes. When my brother left for college in 2009 he had the same minus the VCR, but in addition, he had a computer, a mini fridge, a microwave, a cell phone, an Ipod and numerous other little electronics. Technology has increased the amount of things we surround ourselves with and every year there seems to be more. An example of this is my active resistance to owning a Kindle, even though I must admit that for holidays it would be more convenient than packing four or five books. I grew up with books, and there is something so peaceful about holding an actual book in your hands and getting lost in a story. It seems almost sinful to deny the next generation the pleasure of opening a book in lieu of an electronic replacement. There is also the warm, homey feeling that a bookshelf full of books gives a room. It would be sad to lose that in the push for more technology. I also miss the letters that connected my friends and I between summer camps. The instant gratification of email is missing that anticipation of waiting for a letter, opening that envelop and reading a letter someone took the time to write.

As nostalgic, as I can get about how things were before technology took over my life I have to admit there are positive things about it. First, my Garmin GPS watch is an invaluable tool while I am training to run a marathon. I honestly do not know how I trained before I got that piece of technology. Second, an eight-hour drive to my parents is much easier with an IPod full of music or an audio book to pass the time and a cell phone handy if I run into trouble. Third, when my little sister hit the ditch in the middle of the winter in nowhere Saskatchewan, having a cell phone saved her from sitting on the side of the road in the cold. Incidentally, it also saved her the cost of a tow truck because she called me to contact the tow truck and somehow I ended up footing the bill. Fourth, is being able to have instant contact with my brother while he is stationed in Afghanistan. Without email, Skype and MSN there would be very little contact. As hard as it is when he is on tour, at least we are able to talk to him, to see for ourselves that he is all right. This is very different from his tour in Bosnia or even his first tour in Afghanistan. Lastly, there is the opportunity that sites like Facebook or MSN provide to connect with people from my past, those old friends from high school, summer camp, my first time through college or past employment, that I have lost touch with over time.

Despite my resistance to technology, it appears that technology has found insidious ways to invade my life. Although I know that I have the option to cut the majority of it out, I feel I would be missing a lot if I did that. To find that balance I do take breaks from technology. I find time to sit down with a book and read, despite the cell phone I get out with my dogs, away from the computer and being physically active, especially running allows me to balance my life. As with anything there are positives and negatives, computers and technology are no exceptions. Life is about balance and the greatest downfall with increasing technology is the inability of people to find that balance. We see this in increasing stress related illness and childhood obesity. Technology is not going to slow down, so it is up to the users of technology to implement controls in their own life. Increased technology has not made life easier and has not generated the free time it promised, but it does offer opportunities that we could not have seen back in the 1980’s, such as a 24/7 connection to the world. Whether or not our quality of life has improved is negotiable. It seems that in technologically advanced societies that increased connectivity correlates to a decline in the health and wellness of the general population. As for me, it is back to my email. Perhaps today I will finally get it cleared out.

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Summer Snow - A peace novel

A perfect book for any critical social science class or humanities class. Hathaway skillfully weaves multiple issues into an engaging tapestry of enlightenment. Published by Avatar Publications

In an era of constant war and aggression, William T. Hathaway provides a peaceful breath of air.  An awesome book for any social science educator wanting to present a fresh and alternative view to the constant media hype about war, democracy, aggression, and patriarchy.

What Happens When a Society Succumbs to the Mass Insanity of Warfare?

SUMMER SNOW is a peace novel set amidst the war on terrorism as a US warrior falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality. While Special Forces battle al-Qaeda, the escalating violence threatens their future together and the lives of thousands. To save them, the Sufis use ancient techniques designed to bring peace to the collective consciousness and end war. But can they make them work in time?

A tale of love in the shadow of destruction, SUMMER SNOW blends romance, adventure, and mystic wisdom to communicate its theme that higher consciousness is more effective than violence and that women may be more able than men to lead us there.

The book also portrays how patriarchal machismo causes war and other social pathologies. “Understanding the effects that our culturally imposed gender roles have on us is crucial to understanding why we go to war,” author William T. Hathaway states. “One attraction of war is that it is a substitute for eroticism; it is the ultimate sexual perversion. It also reduces our ability to love. Our society has degraded masculinity into a deadly toxin. It’s poisoned us all. Men have to confront this part of themselves before men and women together can heal it.”

In writing SUMMER SNOW, Hathaway drew on his experiences during a year and a half in Central Asia.

A former Special Forces officer turned peace writer and activist, he is also the author of A WORLD OF HURT (Rinehart Foundation Award), CD-RING, and RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War. He wrote the screenplay for SOCRATES, an educational film starring Ed Asner that was broadcast on PBS. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

The first three chapters are reprinted at http://www.shattercolors.com/fiction/hathaway_summersnow01.htm.

SUMMER SNOW is published by Avatar Publications.

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The tenor of our times

Rather than falling into despair or self-destructive rage, it might help if we review the history of the age in which we live. Despite tendencies toward revolution and reform, what has shaped our times most strongly is revanchism. Rolling back change and reinstating the old order has been the dominant current.

This began immediately after the Russian Revolution, when the United States, Britain, France, and Japan sent in soldiers to try to reverse it. Although they failed, this marked the beginning of seventy years of military and economic warfare. The capitalist powers were so threatened by communism that they pulled out all the stops to overthrow it, unleashing an offensive of sabotage, espionage, and armed conflict that killed millions in Korea and Vietnam, brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and eventually brought the Soviet government to its knees. If communism hadn’t been under this relentless attack, it might have developed into a much different system.

The anti-communist campaign helped fuel the second revanchist movement, fascism. In a Germany impoverished by territorial losses and the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, the Nazis portrayed communists and Jews as actively destroying what was left of the country. They used them as scapegoats to mobilize the Germans into a war of reconquest, to restore the Reich.

The cataclysmic results of this for the Jewish people — one out of every three of them in the world murdered — increased Zionist demands for an independent nation. They became determined to retake the territory from which the Romans had expelled their ancestors two thousand years ago. Their historic chronicles and centuries of vowing, “Next year in Jerusalem,” convinced the Zionists the land actually belonged to them and they had the God-given right to take it back.

Their attempts to do so enraged the current residents, whose ancestors weren’t involved in the expulsion. For centuries Arabs had lived peacefully with Jewish minorities in their midst, but the proclamation of a Jewish state, seizures of land, and the influx of millions of Europeans was to them an invasion. The Arabs saw the creation of Israel as an effort to maintain European-US power in their region after the retreat of colonialism.

Their bitterness over this gave rise to the fourth revanchist movement, Islamic fundamentalism intent on revenging defeats, driving out the infidels, and reestablishing the grandeur of their ancient empire.

The fifth revanchist movement is the right-wing assault on the cultural changes of the 1960s and ’70s. Deeply threatened by the creative chaos that erupted then, conservatives have launched a crusade to stamp it out and restore their version of virtue. From sexuality to religion to politics, liberating trends are being beaten back into conventionality.

It’s become clear that we live in a reactionary era. The conservatives have far more power than the progressives and are determined to use it with as much brutality as necessary to maintain control.

As radicals we’re defying the zeitgeist. We’re opposing not just the Republicans and the Baptists but the tenor of our times. The tide is against us.

But tides change and zeitgeists change. Taking a farther look back in history, we should remember that none of the radicals of the mid 19th century lived to see their ideas put into practice. The reactionaries of their day squashed their efforts, and most of them died thinking they’d failed. But their work caused some cracks in the power structure, and they’re recognized now as revolutionaries. Their writings and actions helped form our efforts, as ours will for the next wave.

So we must persist. Patiently. Perseveringly. After all, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

The unpleasant truth is that Fortress America has to fall. It’s too destructive of people and the planet and too resistant of reform. It’s willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

Its rulers portray our alternatives as either them, Arab terrorists, or Chinese commissars, but that’s just a scare tactic. Our choices are far greater, and we can forge a future better than this.

To defend itself, this system wields a revanchist club in its right hand while waving the promise of democracy in its left. Its liberals play on our hopes of seeing a decent society in our lifetime. They claim to be open to substantive change, a mirage always glimmering four years away but never arriving. Their illusion of reform camouflages the fact that working people around the world are under attack and the conditions of their lives will continue to worsen until we all dismantle this colossus.

Given its power and resilience, that’s going to take a long time, a work of generations. We won’t live to see the new era, but historically that’s not important. What matters is widening the cracks, opening up possibilities for change that others can expand. This is our moment, with its own ragged glory. Overthrowing the corporate dominance of our world and its peoples is a task nothing short of heroic. All else is collaboration.

Now onward! Plenty of cracks are already showing on the structural weak spots, and light is gleaming through them from the other side of these dungeon walls. Bring more wedges and hammers, bring levers and pickaxes. We’ll break out.

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According to some critics, Barrack Obama’s efforts to work out a federal solution to the health care crisis implies that he is a socialist. Indeed, free market logic tends to assert that any form of state interference in private enterprise is, by definition, socialism. Fair enough, but if we use such stringent criteria, then, by extension, we would also have to conclude that the past dozen or so Presidents have all been socialists. Regardless of party affiliation, the vast majority of 20th and 21st century Commanders-in-Chief have been big supporters of federal economic intervention–the extent to which that establishes their credentials as died-in-the-wool socialists is somewhat debatable. Nonetheless, troubling as it may seem, US government “interference” in the private enterprise system has actually been far more common and, dare I say, more beneficial than we often like to admit.

Of course, such a declaration is certain to be viewed as sacrilege by free market enthusiasts. The received wisdom among free marketeers is that any form of governmental intervention is synonymous with bureaucratic bungling. Beginning with Adam Smith, economic theorists have insisted that free markets work best when they are unregulated. That is, in the ethereal absence of government regulation, an “Invisible Hand” magically optimizes market relationships. It’s an inspiring image and, although somewhat Utopian, the fabled Invisible Hand nonetheless affirms many of the fundamental rights and values of free market-worshippers, i.e., small government, individuality, private property.

It’s also pure baloney.

Free marketeers are forever clamoring for economic deregulation. Without doubt, deregulated economies open up extraordinary opportunities for profiteers to bag short term gains. However, an environment of diminished regulation also amplifies the likelihood of economic catastrophe. The financial crashes of 1929 and 2008 offer two instructive examples. In the period immediately preceding each collapse, laissez faire economic philosophies monopolized the hearts and minds of policy-makers. Thus, free marketeers generally see naught but virtue in economic deregulation, however, the reality is that deregulated economic systems are train wrecks waiting to happen. The unfettered pursuit of profit consistently consumes and destroys its very own means of survival. Invisible Hand, indeed!

I suppose the true meaning of the Invisible Hand is that, in the aftermath of financial disasters, the Invisible Hand is nowhere to be found. When free marketeers need a helping hand in the wake of an economic meltdown they don’t turn to Adam Smith, instead they call upon the much-maligned, but ever-dependable federal government.

Indeed, not only is government regulation the most effective means of preventing free marketeers from destroying the economy, but government intervention is perhaps the most essential ingredient in the process of creating a vigorous and stable economy. For example, FDR engineered a miraculous recovery from the Great Depression by imposing unprecedented federal control over the economy. In doing so, he also laid the foundation for creative new public-private synergies (a.k.a., the military-industrial complex). Quite literally, the partnerships that FDR orchestrated between the federal government and private industry not only laid the groundwork for US success during WWII, but those partnerships have also secured America’s enduring status as a super-power throughout the post-war era.

Jumping ahead to the economic fiasco of 2008, the same-old pattern has played out: free marketeers deregulated the economy to the brink of oblivion and then foisted responsibility for disaster recovery onto the feds. Yet, if there is a silver lining to the 2008 financial meltdown, it’s that, right on cue, Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand has taken a powder. For example, from the very moment that Hank Paulson (arch free marketeer, and former Secretary of the Treasury under G.W. Bush) realized the full scope of the 2008 financial disaster, he instantly became a profligate socialist: overseeing the most costly bailout of the US financial system in the nation’s history. Free marketeers are unrepentant advocates of privatized profit and socialized risk. Damage control is–always has been and always will be–the domain of the federal government.

Fortunately, having accumulated lots of experience with the malign influences of the Invisible Hand, the feds have developed a well-oiled capacity to coordinate post-meltdown recoveries. For example, isn’t it amazing how in the space of only a few short months all of the bankrupt banks, having been bailed out and propped up by the feds, have returned to profitability? Also, like a phoenix from the ashes, General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy under Big Brother’s watchful eye with a brand new focus on innovation, customer service, and 21st century profitability. Isn’t it extraordinary what wonders can be produced with a well-timed dose of governmental intervention?

Thus, there is no such thing as a “free market.” On those occasions when the US economy has undergone “enhanced market freedom” (i.e., periods of excessive deregulation), disaster has been quick to follow. Experience has demonstrated that best form of governance involves a close, carefully-managed partnership between public and private initiatives. Interestingly, that is precisely the type of collaboration that Barrack Obama has advocated as a solution to the health care crisis. If that makes President Obama a “socialist”, then I suppose that means that every major public-private endeavor–including initiatives such as national defense, the interstate highway system, communications infrastructure, etc.–that the United States has undertaken has been a form of socialism. Frankly, I think that gives socialism way too much credit. Socialism generally propagates atrociously monolithic, tyrannical and stagnant socio-economic systems (the two most shining examples being the Soviet Union, and Maoist China). The US owes its success as a superpower not to socialism, but to its unique ability to develop a dynamic equilibrium between “managed market” enterprise and public welfare. Ongoing success is assured so long as the US can preserve and enhance its dynamic climate of synergized public and private interests.

Up till now, Americans have permitted the free market to determine the cost and quality of our health care. Not surprisingly, the result is a nightmare that could only be the product of the ham fisted Invisible Hand: substandard health care that’s too expensive for most Americans to use. We can do better. As illustrated above, the best way to fix the health care system is to engage federal oversight and regulation to curb the free market excesses that have brought about the health care crisis. The solution is much simpler than most of us dare believe. If the feds can kick General Motors in the pants and turn it around in just a few short months, then they can do the same for health care.

President Obama is on the right track. With a bit of intervention and guidance from the feds, we can put an end to the free market crisis in health care and thereby improve the health, welfare and longevity of our nation and every one of its citizens.

Related posts:

1. Capitalism 101: The Money Tree
2. The University, Accountability, and Market Discipline in the Late 1990s

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Women in Academe

In recent years, women have begun to make inroads into the ranks of teaching staff in Canadian universities. Between 2002-2003, the number of full-time female faculty had risen to 30 percent, which was a substantial increase from only 20 percent one decade earlier (Statistics Canada, 2006). The growing presence of female faculty has been largely attributed to the rising educational attainment of women in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs. However, although female enrollment has never been greater, their increasing presence in all degree programs has not kept pace with the proportion of males occupying full-professorships in Canadian universities. Currently females occupy only 22 percent of full-time professors, 34 percent of associate professors, and 41.3 percent of assistant professors. Furthermore, their pay pales in comparison to that of men while occupying the same position, averaging a discrepancy of approximately $3,500 (Armenti, 2004). At first glance, female presence within academic circles appears to be rapidly growing. Nonetheless, when analyzing current statistics of women’s positions within Canadian universities, it becomes increasingly apparent that their progression is limited to the lower ranks. As a result, a burning question is “Where are all the women?”

Struggling for Full Citizenship: Why Women lack Full Equality

Alfred Marshall (Heater, 1999) argues that citizens are composed of three bundles of rights: the civil, the political, and the social. For the this article, the focus will be on the bundle of civil rights, in particular, the right to work and how this is an essential criterion to possess full citizenship. The critical aspect of assessing one’s freedom is distinguished between the extent of achievement and the freedom to achieve. Achievement is concerned with what we manage to accomplish, and freedom with the real opportunity that we have to accomplish what we value (Sen, 1992). In regards to the extent of achievement, female academics have managed to achieve their position as professors within universities as the result of their educational background. However, they do not possess the freedom to achieve because their prospects for advancement are severely limited. This is because female professors do not have ample time to invest into their careers because they are required to perform a disproportionate amount of childcare and housework.

At present, Canada has two forms of leave, which include maternity leaves and are often referred to pregnancy leaves, as well as parental leave. A pregnancy leave is a right that pregnant female employees have that entitles them to take up to 17 weeks of unpaid and job-protected time off work. This length of time is typically the same for all provinces with the exception of Quebec and Saskatchewan, which provide 18 weeks, and Alberta, which provides 15 weeks (Deven & Moss, 2006). Following the 17 weeks of pregnancy leave is 35 weeks of parental leave. This leave can be 37 weeks if the mother does not take a pregnancy leave and can be taken by either parent or shared, but cannot extend beyond 52 weeks. However, this “gender-neutral” policy was created in 2000 and the length of parental leave was dramatically increased from the 10 weeks parents were provided prior to the amendment. The money that is paid during a pregnancy or parental leave is paid through Employment Insurance (EI), which is under federal jurisdiction. It is a rate of 55 percent of your average insured earnings up to a yearly maximum amount of $40,000. That is, you can receive a maximum payment of $423 per week. The pay provided for pregnancy leave will not exceed 15 weeks and for parental leave it is 35 weeks (Deven & Moss, 2006). For university faculty, the pay provided to them by the federal government is “topped up” by the institution so they earn approximately 100 percent of their pay for the first two weeks of leave and 85-100 percent of their pay during the next 17 weeks of leave (Caut, 2006). However, as discussed earlier, the amendment of this policy did not relieve women of their roles as primary parents since only 9% of men in Canada took a parental leave between 2001-2006 (Deven & Moss, 2006). Since there is a divergence between what women manage to achieve and the freedom to achieve, women do not posses full citizenship. Their rights are confined within a policy that privileges men’s positions in society and provides them with the freedom to achieve.

Traditional Structure of Academia

Academia requires a large amount of time, preparation, and involvement both inside and outside of the university setting. Since these responsibilities are extremely crucial in the consideration for tenure and promotion, they cannot be compromised with the expectations and demands of childcare and housework. In an attempt to combine family life and work without jeopardizing their prospects of attaining tenure, women faculty has typically taken one of two approaches referred to as “May babies” and post-tenure babies. “May baby” phenomenon refers to timing the birth of one’s child for the month of May, or nearing the early summer months, so that women would be permitted to have children without being forced to take time off from work which would be perceived as a lack of commitment towards their careers (Armenti, 2004). A second strategy that many female academics use for attempting to avoid the conflict between childrearing and attaining tenure is referred to as “post tenure babies.” This is where young female academics postpone having children until after they have obtained tenured positions (Armenti, 2004).

Although female representation in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs is ever growing, the traditional structure of universities inhibits women from attaining equal status, recognition and pay to that of their male counterparts. This reflects what Aisenberg and Harrington (1988) call the “old norms”, a set of historical beliefs and expectations that remain even as new understandings arise. Old norms reiterate the message that female professors must choose between childrearing and work as opposed to combining the two. The upholding of such traditional norms is contradictory because academia is an environment which fosters liberal ideologies and where individuals are encouraged to challenge the status quo without any consequence to their positions (Rhode, 2006). With that, it is unrealistic to assume that the expectations placed on professors can be altered or lessened to alleviate the burden many female academics experience when attempting to balance family life and work. Instead the problem lies with the construction of parenthood, in that women’s primary role has, and continues to be attributed to childrearing which remains unchallenged among many academics.

References

Aisenberg, N., & Harrington, M. (1988). Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press

Armenti, Carmen. (2004). “Women Faculty Seeking Tenure and Parenthood.” Cambridge Journal of Education. Vol. 34: 65-83.

CAUT (Canadian Association of Teachers). “Policy Statement on Parental Leaves.” Retrieved from: http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=248&lang=1

Deven, Fred & Moss, Peter. 2006. “Leave Policies and Research: A Cross-National Overview.” Haworth Press, Inc.

Rhode, Deborah. (2006). In Pursuit of Knowledge. US: Stanford University Press.

Stats Canada. (2006). “University Enrollment.” The Daily-Tuesday October 11th, 2005. Retrieved September 29, 2007 from http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/051011/d051011b.htm

Heater, Derek. (1999). What Happened to Citizenship? Polity Press: Cambridge, UK.

Sen, Amartya. (1992). Inequality Reexamined. Oxford University Press: Cambridge, Mass.

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