Читать книгу Cordite & Testosterone - Why Men Should Not Be Running the World - Cecilia Boone's Tanner - Страница 4

March 2008 headlines:

Prince Harry Goes to War.

In February 2008, Prince Harry of England went to “the front lines” in Afghanistan for 10 weeks.

Why?

Because he wanted “to be one of the lads.” How many men or near-men want to kill and be killed “to be one of the lads”–not even to rescue democracy which is also fatuous altruistic nonsense, ie. killing people to save their lives? or restoring a democracy that never existed? But the press gleefully and admiringly reported how wonderful it was that Prince Harry just wanted “to be one of the lads”.

And he went to the “front lines”. They find this even more admirable since they love the old war talk. But where are the front lines in Afghanistan? They don’t line up and charge with bayonets on the rifles anymore. Did someone draw a line in the dirt for Prince Harry?

This is just too much; words absolutely fail me. Did we ever see Queen Elizabeth take up a gun and stride to the frontlines “to be one of the lasses”?

Prince Harry’s older brother, Prince William, has expressed sorrow that he wasn’t able to go to the front like his younger brother.

The fundamental argument in this book is that males have different drives than females, and the activities they undertake to gratify those drives are destroying the human race and the planet.

Running the world is one activity that should be gender neutral because males and females have an equal stake in the outcomes of local, national and international decisions. There is no evidence in the whole world that indicates male leadership is good for the world, because when you mix testosterone & cordite, common sense, reason, and sanity disappear.

Feminists claim women do feminine things because they have been socialized to do so. Women do female things because they are women. Men and women are not better or worse than each other, just different. The Yin is not better than the Yang. What women have been socialized to accept is male supremacy. The author Barbara Kingsolver remarked, “At some time in their lives, girls look around to see who is running the world, and it’s not women,” and they don’t know why.

Women all over the world have been conditioned to defer to men in “important matters”. Look at every summit meeting–all males–maybe one woman. Look at the propaganda leading up to every trumped up war; suddenly women disappear and we see the heroics of male decision-makers “stepping up to the plate” to defeat evil and keep the world safe for their women and children. There is no room for the voice of women. War means that it will be necessary to slaughter the mother’s children in many hideous ways, so their silence is essential.

Cordite and Testosterone expands on the specific evidence of the male as an unworthy leader, looking at some male phenomenon such as male competition. One example is the male need to achieve the biggest, the tallest, the best, the most, whether it be the most money, the tallest building, the fastest car or the most luxurious yacht.

When men enter into the big competitions, they do so under honorable motives or at least purport to espouse such good motives. But when the competition gets underway, the greed and the power abuse take over. In Iran, the Islamic promise after the downfall of the Shaw, Reza Pahlavi, in 1979, was to create a fair and just Islamic society. And what did they get when the dust settled? Terrorization of the whole country and brutal oppression of the women. Women were forced to hide because they might excite the men sexually, which was ruled to be criminal. The vice squads patrolling on motorcycles and trucks would arrest women (mostly young) who revealed too much sock, or skin around their scarves, or talked to any man not their guardian, and then the vice squads tortured the women, flogged them, and jailed them where the women were “searched” and often raped, if not killed or both. This was not a crime in Iran. This they did in the pursuit of a better society.

Then Ayatollah Komeini vowed to kill all the infidels–this when he was fighting the war with Iraq, a Muslim country. When not fighting the Muslim infidels of Iraq, he vowed death to all Americans–the other infidels. Clearly, a very confused man. The whole country of Iran under Ayatollah Komeini was bedlam. Power turned into utter madness.

The whole world is male oriented, and human society is sick as a result.

Because patriarchy is in the interests of men, they will never willingly relinquish their advantages. Women have tried to make the changes. Women in the early 20th Century wanted the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to choose pregnancy, the right to better paying jobs. It was a drive for equal rights. We got some–some of us got some.

(In 2007, President Sarkozy chose to appoint almost as many women to his cabinet in France as men appointees. This was hopeful until we find that Sarkozy surrounded himself by many corrupt men who have the same old greed factor in their decisions.)

Now women have to go beyond that. Men can’t seem to discipline themselves to put the most important priorities at the top of their Do lists so women have to write the Do lists and make sure the men do those obligations first, then play their games. Nothing less.

Since the ill-taken invasion of Afghanistan, many men all over the world have taken on the fight mode and are looking for trouble. When I saw the stats of the murdered Iraqis and Americans in the Iraq war, 100,000 Iraqis and 4500 Americans–not even mentioning the dead British allies or other civilians–I was reminded of the image of the man who started the Iraq War being interviewed on a golf course during the war who commented when he thought he was off camera, “Okay, take a look at this swing,”–while people were being slaughtered. Even Attila the Hun was more engaged in his brutality than that.

Are we going to ignore the signs of this potential Armageddon hoping it will just go away? No one stops them because men with a lot of guns are hard to argue with. Those of us not participating in the violence tend to think that THEY will come to their senses and see the crimes of war that they are committing–someone somewhere. I think not. There isn’t someone somewhere. There is only us.

The women of Liberia in West Africa realized this, that no one was going to save them from the male bloodlust, so they took on the Liberian government and the bands of brutal oppressors–stood up on the streets and didn’t back down in the face of fearsome threats. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf led the Women of Liberia Action for Peace movement to win the 2005 elections, and in 2006 was inaugurated the first woman president in an African nation. Women can do it.

Primarily, men cannot be trusted to run the world for several main reasons:

1) Because men kill.

Not only do men kill other men and people in wars, but men kill people on the streets, the bars, the homes, and in their cars. They hunt animals for sport, they kill whales for money, they kill kill kill.

Uncle John says that “Murders have claimed more American lives during the 20th Century than wars have.”

(More on this in Chapter 5).

2) Because men lose sight of priorities.

Many men support and avidly pursue the rights to take all and share nothing. In 2002, the company Global Crossing went bankrupt in the US leaving the bankruptcy legacy of loss for how many hundreds and thousands down the line while the CEO got $235M in stock options. $235M.

Enron executives and managers got $744M in 2001 before they went bankrupt leaving people with no pensions.

Tyco Stock Co lost $2.2M while the CEO received $80M in salary. Over three years, he made $300M and was then charged $1m for evading taxes. And he got paid all this while ruining the company. Another CEO was given a $10M severance package.

Bear Sterns went skidding down the greedy hill, but the CEO didn’t suffer.

While these individual irresponsible men who deserved to be fired and jailed were pocketing their bonanza winnings, 17% of the white families in the USA had one parent (a mother), 54% of black families had only a mother, and 28% of the Hispanic families had only a mother. And single mothers, children, and old women are the largest segment of the impoverished in North America; they can’t afford rent, health care or proper food.

Everyday we see the teenager or colored person who steals a car going to jail because thieves must be punished. If an executive or bigtime con artist steals the pension money of 10 000 old people who then live out their lives in poverty, he goes to live in Bermuda.

Nobody stops these men from taking everything and leaving nothing for the children or the mothers or the grandmothers of their children. Shame on them.

These systems would not survive if the male leaders in our patriarchy didn’t approve of them. Our governments were set up to allow these crimes to go unpunished, because they were set up by the men who had much to gain from the system.

Seriously, let’s stop tolerating the oppression, violence, and the killing. A PBS Frontline documentary on the Gulf War showed how brutal men can be with their macho long range weapons that melt the face of the enemy (the enemy–not human beings) onto the steering gear of their tanks. The Scud missile is not so clean as it blasts into fragments killing all the collateral people over a large area. Other weapons such as the Canadian-developed Supergun could stand well back of the returning flack and inflict big damage on the enemy sites. Aren’t we clever?

That is what war is about, of course, killing more of them than they kill of us. To quote General Patton (a hero) “Kill as many of them as you can and as fast as you can.” Such men become highly indignant when the young men they train to kill actually kill the wrong people. To wit, Noriega, bin Laden, the African tribesmen, Canadian, American, Russian soldiers, all soldiers–thinking of the My Lai massacre here. All soldiers are trained to kill, but don’t always kill the right evil people. The right people change, of course.

And our clever scientists keep developing bigger and better weapons–huge Bertha bombs, and dirty bombs, and smart bombs, and megamegaton bombs–all of which our military leaders never expect to fall into the hands of the enemy. How not? The US developed the atom and hydrogen bombs but other countries are not allowed to defend themselves with those same bombs–only the US and maybe the British and the French can be trusted to bomb the right people with them, yet others less trustworthy have acquired them.

Try not to look at Bosnia or Rwanda and try to forget the Ethiopian, Somalian, Sudanese, Myanmar, Iraqi and Afghanistan atrocities while you wonder if the killing will ever stop. We have to consider how to stop the killing when every major country in the world is making a lot of money off the arms trade? How can we stop the biggest bullies in the world from buying, selling, and manufacturing arms when they have the weapons to intimidate any government who might choose to stand in front of the billion dollar export/import business? In December 2011, an explosion in Kabul killed 70 plus people. The Taliban claimed it was not a Taliban attack. Who then? Someone who had a lot of money to gain from continuing the war? The arms trade answers to no one.

On January 10, 2012, a French judge determined that the missile that brought down the Rwandan President’s plane that sparked the Rwandan genocide was fired from a military camp. It was not fired by Tutsi rebels. He claims that extremist Hutus were to blame. Who hired the “extremist rebels”?

3) Because men are racist

Whatever the reason, men are usually more racist than women, and racism does not lead to peaceful coexistence, certainly not in a global world.

The male tribal urge to protect the tribe makes them suspicious of strangers or maybe in the competition for status and supremacy, they see other tribes as unknown quantities in the competition for their needs. Besides, they have seen collectively how the aboriginal tribes who treated strangers well (Canada, USA, Hawaii, Africa, Asia) were decimated for their generosity, so they recognize the need to challenge all comers.

And even when not outwardly racist, it seems much easier to kill people who look different–as apparently they don’t embrace the same sense of loss when their relatives get killed, especially people with darker skin.

4) Because men are linear thinkers.

In most cases, men are linear thinkers (artists and musicians exempted), and the linear thinker sees a world that only goes in two directions, the one they choose and the one that opposes the one they choose. There are no other possibilities.

This is important.

Men see that they are going forward and if they are not going forward, they must be going backwards. If a person isn’t on their side, on their team, then they must be on the other side; they must be the enemy.

After 9-11 in New York, President George W. Bush announced his war on terror, “You are either with us or against us.” The absolute audacity and threat in that statement is staggering.

Many men think this way; there is good or there is bad. A heterosexual is good and a homosexual is bad, not noticing that pedophiles come in both orientations. She’s a nice girl (that is, a girl who follows the rules men set out for her) or she’s a slut is the Muslim/Christian/Judeo take. If men aren’t winning, they must be losing. This is linear thinking of the very worst kind.

After the Sept 11 attacks, there was only one straight line response–retaliate. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who to retaliate against, just pick someone and beat them up. It turned out to be Afghanistan and then Iraq because they both looked like easy fights–and they both have oil or a pipeline for the oil. And Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t have any fighter jets to carry bombs across the Atlantic, and neither had the means to shoot down high-flying bombers. And the homeland wouldn’t get damaged if the war was staged half a globe away.

Karate and Kung Fu are martial arts that demonstrate the power of the single-minded, the focused energy. The laser beam demonstrates the power of a concentrated little beam of light that can be a miraculous little tool, but it can also be used as a serious weapon. So, too, can otherwise helpful useful amazing men. When single-minded in destructive pursuits, using the laser strength of a singular focus, these leaders can pursue their ideologies at all costs.

With this linear approach to life that, on the positive side, enables men to achieve marvelous feats of engineering and technology, they are, unfortunately limited in their ability to see the full spectrum of possibilities and options. Most men are unable to see the whole picture, to see the kids in the foreground, the house and school behind them, the tree-covered hills bright in the clean air in the distance. They see a red Ferrari with a blonde woman at the wheel driving along the road in the middle distance–that’s all they see.

We would do well to look at the motivators of men to understand what makes them do what they do, as we do in chapter 2; then much of what we see in the world is more understandable.

Leadership requires the wisdom that comes from both sides of humanity, the male and the female. Do we want our babies to inherit a civilization of the brutes, where the cruelest men have the power and there are no safe places to live? Unbridled male behavior takes us down that road, and we are on that road.