Men, Lurking

Milkman, Anna Burns

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann

It's been a bad year for men.  Although, to be fair, when it comes to men's behavior, every year is pretty much the same.

Just recently, watching what reminded me (from my reading, not direct experience) of the spectacle of devout Bolsheviks falling over themselves to praise the Leader--"The Gardener of Human Happiness," The Man of Steel,"and, perhaps most aptly given that our Leader has been likened, without apparent irony, to Jesus Christ, "Dear Father"--I felt deeply embarrassed for my sex, age-group, and ethnicity (full disclosure: I am an oldish white male).  The defense of our recently impeached President by the apparatchiks of the GOP ("Groveling Odious Partisans") presented a nearly eight-hour spectacle not only of mendacity, boot-licking, and abject immorality, it also made it perfectly clear to this white male that what we are seeing is the end--thank God--of the rule of old white men over women, children, people of color, and our planet.

This can't go on, and the fervid displays of disingenuousness, smugness, and worst of all, the sense of entitlement that have been on display during these past weeks not only here but also in Great Britain--B. Johnson being Trump's twin, bad hair, fascistic tendencies, and a shared aversion to the truth--suggest that what is transpiring is a last, desperate attempt by a powerful but increasingly irrelevant class of old men (and young men with old souls) to cling to the prerogatives that they believe must be accorded their sex--power and money it goes without saying, but also unimpeded access to women's bodies, authoritarian control of our political and economic system, dictatorial influence over culture, and, in general, the status of demigods that has been, until now, their presumptive birth-right.  That's over, and, believe it or not, it is Trump, the Omega-Male, who is destroying what he hopes to preserve, destroying his half-baked MAGA-fantasy through fecklessness, narcissism, and immorality, and at the same time, for those persons paying attention, undoing all claims of masculine legitimacy--that is, all of the historic nonsense that has turned an ideology of masculine superiority into a farcical circus peopled by preening nobodies whose claims to "natural" domination of the world would be laughable were it not for the tragic consequences these nabobs have visited on human beings and our planet.

A bit of a rant, and poorly punctuated, but it's how we men talk.

My prognosis may appear counter-intuitive given the numerical dominance of white men in business, government, academe, the military, and everywhere else there is power to wield, but bear in mind that the demise of every hegemonic system in history--from feudalism to absolutism to so-called communism--has come at the moment of that system's seemingly greatest power.  The right-wing, anti-democratic, misogynistic, racist male egotism embodied by Trump, McConnell, Weinstein, Bezos, and their devoted followers is unleashing--even as I write these words--a backlash that is global and that will, in time, wash away the so-called principles and self-serving ideas of these men, wipe it away like a great Tsunami sweeping across a landscape laid waste by centuries of greed, stupidity, and arrogance.

This is the central point of Margaret Atwood's continuation of The Handmaid's Tale, the (I'm sorry to say) far less engaging novel The Testaments whose central premise is that rotten systems of government--in the case of the novel, brutal patriarchy--decay from within.  While the sequel to AHT was clunky, Atwood's premise is right on the money.  Rot begets rot; corruption engenders corruption; the cult of death--for that is what patriarchy really is--kills itself, though, unfortunately, not until it has claimed far too many innocent victims.

Will the rest of us--women, children, the poor and powerless, and decent fellows like myself, get out alive?  That remains to be seen.  I don't anticipate a long-term residence on earth, but I lament daily the world my daughters, my wife, and the good people I know will inherit, and I resent bitterly the stupidity and callous self-interest that has created what has passed beyond crisis to something more akin to disaster.

Yes, of course, there are wonderful men and awful women, sure, natch.  I generalize to be sure. Congressman Schiff seems a decent sort; Congressman Jordan of the shirt-sleeves, not so much. But this isn't a note about politicians, but about the trajectory of masculine behavior as it has for too long existed: we're in danger of expiring as a species; birds and turtles are disappearing; coral reefs are doomed; thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children starve and/or sleep under our freeways while the uber-rich (Rudy Giuliani!) own six homes and belong (Rudy Giuliani!) to eleven country clubs.  It's unnatural. The world is being devoured by piggish men who do nothing for anyone--they don't police our streets, fight our fires, teach our children, tend to the sick and the dying, build anything--they spend their wasteful days spinning money into more money, fomenting wars for others to fight, shitting in golden toilets, and spending an inordinate amount of time harassing, degrading, and raping women.

Enough.

***

Meanwhile, women fight back with courage, dignity, and art.

Anna Burns, for example, in a novel of extraordinary originality, plunks us into the odd reality of "middle sister," an eighteen-year-old who "reads while walking," and negotiates the violent world of what is presumably Northern Ireland during the 1970's (Burns was born in Belfast).  The unnamed characters who walk the streets of Burns's unnamed city negotiate a masculine world of political and personal grievance that leaves nearly every family mourning a son, a father, a daughter.  Burns, with deftness and imaginative scope unusual in contemporary fiction, pushes her story of sectarian violence from realism into the realm of parable: the repetitions of theme and language, the characters identified by their social role rather than by name ("maybe-boyfriend," "Milkman," "renouncers"), the circling back and forth among patterns of action, nearly all of which end in bloodshed--these rhetorical and thematic modes of storytelling add up to a novel that enacts the cycles of violence and degrees of victimization that characterize so many parts of the world in which we live. Most ominous for me are the lurking men, the "renouncers" who hate those from "over the ocean" and who inflict vengeance against any of their countrymen who deviate from a strict pattern of permissible behavior. "Informer" takes on the weight of "non-conformist": maybe-boyfriend who is middle sister's maybe love interest is suspect because he likes sunsets and stars; the Milkman (who isn't a milkman) is the chief of the "renouncers," perhaps an IRA gunman, and his unrequited love interest in middle-sister isn't offered as courtship but as the threat of sexual violence--he's the most powerful man in the community and is entitled to take whomever he wishes, no questions asked.  Middle-sister does her best to negotiate a terrain as replete with fixed rituals and unyielding culture as the Catholic Church; she fights rumors, but truth holds little sway in her world, just as it holds none in ours.  

Milkman is narrated throughout by middle-sister; dialogue is reported by her, all descriptions are filtered through her lively consciousness.  In this regard, Anna Burns and Lucy Ellmann approach the novel with similar aims: Burns reprises the psychological effect of simmering violence on the consciousness of one sensitive character; Ellmann, over the course of one-thousand pages (and about three sentences) uses a hurtling form of stream-of-consciousness (as in Joyce's Ulysses) to survey in (frankly, at times) excruciating detail the anxieties of an Ohio housewife, an Everywoman. In one sense, Burns and Ellmann traverse the same terrain, for both women view a world created by men that is baffling, full of threats, irrational, rapacious, and indifferent to the well-being of the weak, the very people for whom, one presumes, societies were created.  Ellmann's housewife isn't faced with the Shadow of the Gunman (see Sean O'Casey) but with the enervating rituals of up-to-the-minute American life. Ellmann, who has resided in Scotland for many years, is utterly hip to what is going on in our local precincts--the slipping away of a sense that we are anything other than a national shopping mall, that we can have a life outside of the internet, that we exist in any meaningful way with other people, that we give a shit about anyone other than ourselves.  Ellmann does isolation with the same intelligence that Burns does paranoia; in the end, these feelings amount to the same thing.

With Burns one is, as it were, 10,000 feet above the world, looking down at a grid of unnamed streets and neighborhoods and people, at events uprooted from time and place, at the general pattern of human folly. Ellmann, on the other hand, is like one of the historians of the annales school: she unpacks every moment, every impression, every thought of her narrator.  Both novels explore the interior life of a woman who possesses the gift of observation but who is put continuously on the defensive by a world that has become unmanageable.  Both Belfast and Ohio are sunk in violence, though of different sorts. Middle-sister lives among gunmen; Ohio-housewife lives in the murkiness of a way of life that is disappearing--security, community, child-rearing, marriage, work, patriotism--none of the verities with which Housewife has lived are enduring.  Trump makes numerous cameo appearances in Ducks, Newburyport as the talisman of this slipping away. Who better to embody the mess we are in?

What, Housewife wonders, has become of us?  What, indeed?

Christmas Day, 2019
George Ovitt