It was supposedly a game, but people were dying.
When it came time to give out the awards, a male wisdom figure told me to go hide in the women’s bathroom, which I did.
I simultaneously watched the awards, and everyone, victor and defeated alike, had their tongues stapled, so they could not speak.
There are several levels of potential analysis, plus the ones that are not obvious to me, but which may be obvious to someone else.
First, I think most men who suffer trauma fight the world their whole lives. And the reward and price for victory, for even staying in the battle, is losing the ability to describe the fight, to forget who the real enemy is, to forget what was hidden, to identify fighting with masculinity.
There is a kernel of truth, of course, to the phrase “toxic masculinity”, but if the people using this phrase were honest and healthy themselves, they would use the phrase unhealthy masculinity. Wounded masculinity perhaps.
And I would suggest men and women tend to process these things differently. Men are not as willing as women to live in shame. They become aggressive, abusive. Women, in turn, allow themselves to be abused. It is not masochism, per se, but perhaps a conditioned organismic preference for surrender–shame–to fighting or running, since biologically they know they have always been the physically weaker (and in my view emotionally stronger, on balance) sex. You’re not supposed to say that, but it is obviously true.
Military formations may be a way of harness shame en masse. It is a culturally acceptable way for men to allow the feeling of shame–of subordination–to be sublimated (if I might pull a term from the work of a man I intensely disagree with on most topics) into pride. The Marines, as one example, break you, but then you get to claim you are a real man because you were a Marine. But the breaking might include wading through literal shit in the cesspools of Parris Island, as a friend of mine from long ago said he had to do, as a member of the Correctional Custody Platoon, which he got into because he couldn’t do 3 pullups when he showed up for Basic. This is shame inducing.
For me, this dream might be a realization that the way I have been fighting has not been working, that I might need to contemplate some surrender, some compromise. Some of the “know the way of the male but stick to the way of the female” of the Tao Te Ching. When I stop devoting all my energy to suppressing feelings, they become available to me.
On a broader level, I would suggest that in some respects war IS a game. Men look forward to it, as a way of testing themselves. But it is an absurd, idiotic game, in some respects. Without denigrating the virtues of physical courage, profound loyalty, the increase in the capacity to suffer without complaint and everything else that comes with it, I would say that war steals from all of us our souls. And it does so in such a way that it prevents us from speaking of it. Veterans who show up in veterans groups to tell the same stories over and over and over, are really trying to convince themselves of the value of their sacrifices. And a great many who cannot convince themselves, cannot perform that quasi-magic trick, wind up killing themselves.
And I am not saying we should not have fought World War 2 (although I am quite sure we should not have intervened in World War 1), or even Korea or Vietnam. I am saying that war is an insane institution we need to understand should only be engaged in for the very, very best of reasons, and that even then, it is evil, and needs to be understood as much.
As Lao Tzu wrote, a victory should be celebrated as a funeral. Do not brag and boast, and do not tell lies about the glories of combat. As that same friend said, who did eventually see combat, who did have friends die in his arms, “war is as romantic as a meat grinder”.
I am presently listening to the audiobook of “The Metaphysical Club”, and it has dealt in the main thus far with Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., who saw a LOT of action in the Civil War. He was shot three times: in the chest, in the neck, and in the foot. He also had dysentery. The book is clearly leading to the philosophical conclusions he derived from all of this, which are highly topical now.
Given that we all believe what we believe, how do we peacefully coexist? This is both a social and a political problem. We have solved the political problem with our Constitution. It is the social problem, a very, very old social problem, an atavistic social problem, which we are now seeing played out in our streets once again. It will be interesting to see where all this goes.
Few thoughts.