Title : "American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost, in some personal wasteland..."
link : "American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost, in some personal wasteland..."
"American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost, in some personal wasteland..."
"... of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. There's a lot of hurtin' cowboys out there."Said Ed Honnold, "the mild-mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of dancing and roaring, hugging and weeping," quoted in "MEN'S MOVEMENT STALKS THE WILD SIDE," a WaPo column by Phil McCombs, published on February 3, 1991 — 30 years ago.
I'm reading that this morning because the news about Trump at the Atlanta baseball game doing the tomahawk chop — blogged here — jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?
[At t]he Men's Council of Greater Washington, which Honnold... sheds his Clark Kent image as he leads 500 men who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shake with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street as they raise Honnold -- gyrating and clapping -- high overhead and parade him about the room. Then group leaders circulate with large feathers and clay pots, wafting the smoke of burning sage into waiting faces in what is termed a Native American ritual, designed to put you in touch with generations of male ancestors. It's easy to make fun of this sort of thing, and many news reports have been highly skeptical. As a man never having experienced it before, you feel distinctly uncomfortable at first.
Perhaps it's the arm-over-arm ouhmmmm, ouhmmm, ouhmmm stuff they do, or the unexpected whiff of real paganism so jarring to the Judeo-Christian sensibility, or just the group mentality with its slight suggestion of coercion. On the other hand, there's a kind of charming innocence here too, harking back to clubhouses and high school locker rooms, and suddenly you remember the slap of wrestlers on the mats, the shouts of drill sergeants in the smoky pre-dawn chill down at Fort Jackson, or the way your bare feet toughened to the road gravel over the long summers when you were a kid running on it with your friends....
Also:
The truth, says Robert Bly, who will lead today's gathering with storyteller Michael Meade, is that a man's life is a shocking descent into grief, and not the upwardly mobile American dreamscape of high-flying success that so many want. Bly, the big poet with the multicolored vest and wild white hair, author of the new bestseller "Iron John: A Book About Men" and head guru of the so-called Mythopoetic Men's Movement, says flatly that "the door to men's feeling is grief, and to be able to make that turn downward, break the upward spiral, and start thinking about what actually went on in your family" is a key to what people in the movement like to call "the mature masculine." American men never learned to be Men, Bly theorizes, because after the Industrial Revolution their fathers weren't around to teach them. They were raised by women who, no matter how wonderful, didn't know how to convey "the distinctive male mode of feeling." Thus, the theory goes, instead of mature or "kingly" men, what we tend to have these days are mama's boys, filled with intense "father hunger," who feel uncomfortable in the company of men but who certainly can't stand up to a woman either. ...The new men's movement has grown explosively since January 1990, when a Bill Moyers special on Bly, "A Gathering of Men," appeared on PBS....
Oh! We have YouTube now. Here:
Lots more at the link. This is just a snippet:
The Jungian approach -- with its emphasis on archetypes, myths, spirituality and collective unconscious -- is critical to the new men's movement, laying a basis for the assertions not only that men and women are different, but that men are a certain way and no other. Bly, for example, attacks what he calls "soft males," the "Woody Allen-types" who came of age alongside the feminist movement and who Bly thinks have left behind the necessarily "fierce" aspect of manliness. "Many of these men are not happy," he writes. "You quickly notice the lack of energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving." Yet the new mythopoetic leaders, in rediscovering this ancient male "gender ground," as it's called, claim they're rejecting the John Wayne image as well. They're seeking something new....Many women have a lot to gain, according to Honnold, if their men can break away from all-too-typical patterns of alternating passivity and rage through "nurturing associations" with other men.... But many women react with mild puzzlement, suspicion or shock.... And Carol Bly, Robert's ex-wife, told the Utne Reader that she considers the movement "frightening. The goal of invoking 'exhilaration' through regressive behavior isn't what's needed."..."There's father hunger and grandfather hunger," Bly observes over his bacon and eggs, "and the grandfather hunger is so deep that we will even hire a total fake like Reagan because he looks like a grandfather. Actually, he's a regressed child."
Robert Bly is still alive. He's 94. I don't think we ever heard from him about Trump, and I don't think he's said anything about the Atlanta Braves and their tomahawk chop and chant.
By the way, the tomahawk chop began in the same year WaPo published that big article, 1991. Per Wikipedia: "The tomahawk chop was adopted by fans of the Atlanta Braves in 1991. Carolyn King, the Braves organist, had played the 'tomahawk song' during most at bats for a few seasons... "
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