The email saga continues. James Comey has made another "bombshell" revelation that there are Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner's computer. It has now dominated a news cycle, but as one writer put it, "Donald Trump exulted about the discovery of new emails from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state" claiming they were "Bigger than Watergate!" Well, yes, "Sure, they could be. They could also be pleas from Clinton that Huma Abedin fetch her a skinny latte from Starbucks. We don’t know. And the horrifying thing is that the F.B.I. director, James Comey, didn’t seem to know, either, even as he disclosed their existence to the world." One thing is relatively clear. The conservative side of the camp just can't give it up. They are, in effect, searching for the black swan. We can't prove it doesn't exist, which means it may exist, and the conservative camp has invested too much time and treasure trying to find it, that they have become exhibit one of the "sunk cost fallacy." They just can't give it up, and just keep shifting from the possibility to the probability to the actuality. But really, how likely is it, after all, that they are going to find a "black swan" email on Weiner's computer, one that reads "Hey Huma, would you pick up a skinny latte, and oh by the way have naughty boy send the me the contact info on that satanic assassination cult that did away with Vance. I've got someone else in mind. Tell Lizzy to meet me at Four Seasons. I've got a new lubricant, so tell her to bring the big dildo, the black one! You and Anthony can join if you want. Finally, send the attached launch codes on to the Saudis. The big abdullah Obama has been bugging me to 'get 'er done' before prayers. Allah Akbar!" Except in the most feverish imagination of the most conspiratorial Breitbart reader, and without apologies for the crudity, the likelihood of such an email is virtually nonexistent. So what really do they expect to find?
So when do they give it up? When every last email has been read and scrutinized? Even then, no doubt, there will be assertions of "missing" emails, and of course the only reason they are "missing" is because they're incriminating. So never? It is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt, a bitch hunt. Whether they find anything or not seems to be irrelevant to the next stage of the investigation. In the media malaise, the mere fact that the hunt is on seems to be damaging. An interesting article by Susan Faludi appeared this morning in the Times, "How Hillary Clinton Met Satan." I mention it because it fits the narrative picture I have been circling. It concerns the "disposables," particularly the under-educated, white-male "disposables" that make up the more rabid conservative right. At fundament it is an economic argument -- that is to say, the so-called "jobless recovery" doesn't feel like a recovery at all if one is among the jobless. The post points out that in recent decades, recovery "often meant replacing employees with computers. This could explain why the jobs we lose in a recession don’t seem to return anymore: The positions became obsolete." Moreover, "evidence says there might be another reason for these stubborn spells of low employment: after a recession, the remaining job openings may become harder to fill because employers start to demand people with better skills, who can adapt to new technologies in order to be more productive." In other words, "it’s not just that many jobs go extinct during a recession. Even the surviving jobs sometimes shift beyond recognition — and beyond the reach of many." The under-educated, white males, many of whom were engaged in routine and repetitive industrial tasks, were disposed of quickly, and many others see the hand-writing on the wall. How many can watch news reports of driverless vehicles without seeing their long-haul livelihood disposed of as well?
At fundament it is an economic argument, but where does one direct one's resentment? At Elon Musk? At Google? As Faludi recognizes, it is much more satisfying on a human level to direct one's resentments at the feminization of American society, and in particular the long-standing symbol of American feminization, Hillary Clinton. "Wounded male prerogative," she points out, "was personal and sexual. The 1990s produced a generation of men who felt (and still feel) left behind by a society redefining power and success in terms of ornament and celebrity and demoting the value of industry and brawn, while simultaneously challenging men’s value as family providers. Though women weren’t the source of men’s pain, the antagonist conjured up by aggrieved men I talked with in those years had a feminine face, and very often that face was Hillary’s." There is a good deal in this statement that deserves unpacking, but I would just point out that "demoting the value of industry and brawn," demotes as well a core American value of "hard work." The challenge to "men's value as family providers" was not met with an alternative vision. If men no long have value as "family providers," where then does their value lie? One need not necessarily be a misogynistic brute to suggest that the feminist movement left many men, who had defined themselves as "strong" and "providers," adrift in a culture that no longer valued the "hard work" that gave dignity and honor to them as men. It was not simply, or not only, the loss of "male prerogative," but a culture that sees them, increasingly, as irrelevant. It isn't surprising that "the antagonist conjured up by aggrieved men" had a woman's face, and that "face was Hillary's." She was a symbol and target of convenience for the welling resentment that has now found it's full but ironic expression in Donald Trump. If Hilary represents the bug-a-boo of feminism for the aggrieved male, he is precisely the sort of sexually dominant male narcissism that actually SHOULD be rendered irrelevant. With his aggressive braggadocio, he is Anthony Weiner and a Bill Clinton wanna-be rolled into one, and his philandering deplorability makes him one big politically incorrect FU to Hillary and her kind.
So I keep asking, what to do? Faludi is right. Women are not the source of the under-educated, white, middle-class male's pain. Impersonal and genderless economic forces take tmost of the onus, but for the one experiencing those forces, they are neither impersonal nor genderless. Consider, for example, Jeff Guo writing on the jobless recovery for the Washington Post remarks, non-routine professions "have been much hardier. These are, by definition, the jobs that are harder to automate. In today’s society, they tend to be either highly paid or lowly paid: analysts and janitors, lawyers and home health aides, Silicon Valley programmers and Starbucks baristas. What these workers have in common is that they all have to think flexibly and creatively throughout the day, whether that involves debugging a section of code or helping a customer choose between different kinds of seasonal lattes." This litany of contrasts suggests two things. First, the "lowly paid" professions require little in the way of education, and might provide a venue for the disposed of male, except! and it's an important exception, they all seem to be traditionally female or minority positions. Let's be honest, when we picture a janitor's face, we see either a black face or "little miss housekeeping." When we picture the "home health aide," a secondary form of nursing, we see a female, and the barista is just a hoity-toity name for "waitress in a coffee shop." If we do picture a male barista, it's a "student working their way through college" with a paperback copy of "Beyond Good and Evil" in their back pocket to prove it. Granted, these are gender stereotypes, and for the most part we should "just get over it," and any job is better than no job, but only barely. The "lowly paid" jobs grant little in the way of dignity or honor for the displaced factory worker who can no longer take pride in being "the family provider."
Second, the litany of contrasts implies that education is the answer for the disposable male. Analysts, lawyers, and programmers all require education, often education at a graduate level. So, if you want a highly paid profession, get an education. It's perhaps not surprising that the "liberal" often has "education" at or near the center of their agenda. I would place it there as well because education is, and always will be, important, but education is not the answer for the disposable male. For one thing, attitudes toward education vary, particularly toward a secular STEM (science technology engineering math) education, but for many it seems increasingly at odds with core belief. As just one small example, the continuing (never-ending?) debate over the inclusion of "creationism" in school curriculum, a mythology that draws from Genesis and lends authority to a male dominate hierarchy. The divide provides fodder for the "how-stupid-can-you-be" sanctimony on the left, but for many, particularly on the right, the debate provides yet one more piece of convincing evidence that it is better to have their children "churched" than "schooled." As has been oft noted and examined, there is also strain of anti-intellectualism that runs through American life, a strain compounded by the increasingly partisan sense that a "liberal" education is just that, a "liberal" education. As time goes on, it is compounded also by the nagging sense that education itself is nothing more than a thinly disguised attempt to push a feminist agenda. As a recent Pew report notes, "Even though college enrollment rates among young people have risen in recent decades, a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows that females outpace males in college enrollment." There are any number of explanations, none of them completely satisfactory. One study, cited by Pew, notes in particular that three factors may have contributed, technical, social, and legal. "The widespread legality and
acceptance of the “pill” as a birth control device allowed young women to plan their
futures more accurately and also helped facilitate a large increase in the age at first
marriage," which itself is problematic for those who hold traditional views, not only of female sexuality, but of male dominance in the social hierarchy captured by the phrase "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen." The technical innovation was compounded by "other enabling factors," not least the "the resurgence of feminism, "which not only "empowered young women," but led to "greater guarantees by the government that discrimination against women in education and employment would not be tolerated."
It is then, perhaps not so surprising that Hillary Rodham Clinton has become the symbolic target of the "radical feminist agenda." For the disposable, she represents in her gender, in her accomplishment, in her wonky intellectualism, in her sanctimony toward the "deplorables," a full and complete answer to the question, "what is wrong with this picture?" I think Faludi is correct, that "Republican ideological absolutism, nourished by masculine insecurity, created an amalgam corrosive to pragmatic politics," but to dismiss the antipathy merely as masculine insecurity is a mistake. She is correct to note that "it’s a fiction to think we can move on beyond" the culture war surrounding Clinton "without settling it," but she is wrong to think "settling it requires helping Mrs. Clinton triumph once and for all against the calumnies that were created to define her." Well, wrong at least in part. It depends upon what she means by "triumph." An electoral triumph alone will no more solve the problem than Obama's electoral triumph solved the racial problem. Though one can only hope she wins the election -- and I do very sincerely hope she wins the election for oh so many reasons -- nevertheless when she wakes up to govern after her inauguration, there will still be a sizable base of republicans who will believe the "calumnies," that her presidency is "illegitimate," and that she has a "radical feminist agenda" targeting those who simply want to "work hard" and "support their family." We have quite successfully demoted the value of "industry and brawn," but we have not addressed the real pain, or the misplaced resentments, of "a generation of men who felt (and still feel) left behind."
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