You have an issue from personal experience (you seem pissed at your mother, too) and you let it color everything... Kelley
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I wrote a different part 2 that went into the dialectics of violence and class. But after going over it, I thought everybody's heard all that before. I'll post some of that below, because it answers something Brian Dauth brought up about out powering the Alpha male.
I decided to go back to this business of my mother. Hopefully you will find this explanation sheds some light on what's behind my rant on the Right and masculinity, and what my mother has to do with it.
My problem with my mother was, when I was twelve she married a rightwing guy (a high tech engineer) who was close enough to GWB's personae to make it creepy. Like Bush he pretended to be the Alpha male type (a bully), especially around women and kids, and was a very authoritarian and abusive jerk. At the time, and ever since, I couldn't decide who I was more pissed at, my mother for marrying this asshole, or the asshole himself.
So here's the link to violence. I put up with this guy's unbridled male rivalry and oppression, with a fair amount physical abuse tossed until there came a day. His idea of fatherhood was to push me around, give out orders and beat me up if things didn't go his way. He was probably six two and weighed two-thirty something. Big. So when I was fifteen I took him on in the kitchen, in a crazy fist fight and managed to score a couple in his face. I took a few and started bleeding all over and ran out after my last punch which broke his glasses and cracked his nose. I knew I was lucky to get in that last one, so I ran out of the house before he could get a hold of me. I stayed gone for a couple of days.
My very personal problems with GWB and the Right are they remind me of my stepfather. The current rightwing rhetoric on just about everything from praising and citing the Constitution while ignoring its meaning, to their male supremacist attitude about women and their complete disrespect and latent racism toward African Americans and Latinos, all the way down to their total dismissal of calls for social fairness, compassion, and support for people below there elitist class---all of it---could easily have come out of my stepfather's mouth and did. He considered all this the height of manly politics and patriotism.
In my psychoanalytic landscape then GWB and the Right are the evil stepfather. The US public who voted for this (and the Demos who refuse to fight it) are the mother, and I am the sulking, hostile, and violent teenage son, sitting there impotently at dinner, pretending to be polite with proper table manners while watching and being oppressed by this charade.
So my problem with the Right and GWB's bogus manly bullshit like two worthless, murderous, oppressive wars and a neo-fascist Patriot Act, is very personal. It isn't political or just business. And you are correct. I am very pissed at the US public (my mother) for marrying this shit head.
Because all this sounds like a soup opera, I am even more pissed, because it doesn't rise in its psycho-social dynamics to the heights of a compelling and powerful tragedy, as it should, but mere re-enacts a shallow farce that borders on comedy. If it were not for the wars and its war criminal atrocities, maybe it would be all trivial nonsense. . . . . .
Brian writes:
``But does behaving like an Alpha male in order to get rid of the current Alpha male solve anything or does it merely replace one brand of smug, authoritarian oppression with a new one -- kinder and gentler perhaps, but decidedly still Alpha?..''
No. It doesn't liberate at all. Your right. It turns into yet another cycle of oppression and violence in a long dialectical chain, following Judith Butler and Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind narratives.
Both wings of the power elite (but particular this one) in public office push and exploit these self-perpetuating cycle of class, race, and gender war of oppression and violence as the very fabric of social life---as the psychic life of power itself, through their endless media discourses, their policies, their laws, their actions...their foreign wars, their prisons...Abu Ghraib.
But it is a paradox. How do you fight against violence and oppression? Becoming subjugated, obsequious, and pretending non-violence and pretending that subjection breaks the cycle of oppression only gives the superficial apparence of breaking the cycle through entrapment and self-destruction---the working class eating itself alive, accomplice in their own oppression---or me twisting myself inside out with hatred, rage, and dreams of revenge. But yet another paradox arises, that of co-dependency, a master slave dialectic that remains non-violent only because the oppressed don't revolt...or alternatively, the oppression gets even more violent, if they (I, we) do revolt...
Most difficult, perhaps depressing, but for me of intense interest is this. To know, understand, experience, to live, analyze, and express all this with all the objectivity I can muster, doesn't change the horrendous effects which remain both personal and political. Writing about it may not mediate those effects, yet I hope it does at least sometimes.
So, the arts do provide some restoration, provide some solice, hence the intensity of so many arts media, film, video, or rap, slam, and graffiti which all seem to constantly oscillate around the attractive power poles of violence, criminality, and some unspecified politics with nearly illegible commentary...
These current art expressions while completely dis-similar in style are not unlike in theme to those I did long ago in painting, drawing and sculpture, where the major motifs all revolved around power, death, and violence... Which of course were being publicly enacted as Kennedy's assassination, civil rights bombings and murders, and then Vietnam.
CG