Manufacturing Shame: The Danger of Purity

Pandora Hopkins

PART II A: PACIFICATION

Creative destruction, surgical strike, ethnic cleansing, total war-----

All of the above are recent improvisations on what has been called “the art of war” at least since the days of Sun Tzu twenty-five hundred years ago. They are also sub-truths that convey individually different associations (some emphasizing growth and progress while others lean more toward order and restoration). At the same time, they tend to imply normalcy: warfare may be uncomfortable, perhaps, but necessary, like cleaning your house. Of course, this kind of house-cleaning involves sweeping away, not dust, but groups of people—categories of individuals that disgust you—or simply are on that other team. “Long after purging blood had faded away as a purging practice, it still seemed right for the body politic” (Braudy 374).

The purging function of war can easily reverberate under the level of consciousness, even to a peace-worker—perhaps bringing up a more humble concept as well: If it hurts [or tastes bad], it must be good for you; it is the kind of sub-truth Dundes called a folk-idea (Dundes 1972: 98). All of these terms share the concepts of domination, order, progress, definition—attributes traditionally associated with masculinity.

There you go with that fucking hand again. You look like a fucking pansy!
--G.H.W.Bush being groomed as a presidential nominee (qted in Ducat 2004:84)

Like Theodore Roosevelt long before him, Bush Sr., in 1988, had to work hard to manufacture the manliness that was expected of presidential aspirants; he was never as successful as his son, who had the advantage of spending summer vacations on his father’s Texas “ranch.” Teddy, who, as a 23-year-old New York State Assemblyman, had been taunted by such humiliating names as “punkin-lily” and “weakling,” managed the transformation successfully; he also bought a ranch (Ducat 2004: 78). The first Roosevelt was held up as a model by Kagan and Kristol in their introduction to Present Dangers. Roosevelt, they wrote, had known how to toughen up an America grown “effete” through too much peace and prosperity. In their view, the 1990s were a similarly “squandered decade” during which Americans had been “lavishing the gifts of an illusory ‘peace dividend’ upon themselves and frittering away the opportunity to strengthen and extend a natural order uniquely favorable to the United States.” The PNAC spokespersons admire Roosevelt’s “contempt” for global peace-workers and refer to the “burden” they believe the U.S. is fated to carry, a not-so-veiled allusion to their hero’s “white man’s burden”(Kagan 2000).

Creative destruction is a concept with a pedigree especially associated with neocon Michael Ledeen who does not hide his disdain for other cultures (see above, p.2). Ledeen’s much-quoted passage from The War Against the Terror Masters (2002) begins: "Creative destruction is our middle name.” He did not originate the term; it had been used, a half century before, in the field of economics (Schumpeter1975: 194, 82-85) and later in political science by Andrew Heywood who wrote “…despite an undoubted inclination toward nihilism, war and death, fascism saw itself as a creative force, a means of constructing a new civilization through “creative destruction” (1992/2003). Ledeen’s own interest in Italian fascism is well documented by early publications, including his doctoral dissertation (Laughland 2002).

Surgical Strike: Jane’s Information Group website, the global information source for military technology, asserts that the magical precision generally accorded this concept is “a myth” (their words). Jane’s does not mention its metaphoric value for generating sub-truths.

Ethnic cleansing: This translation of the Serbo-Croatian etnièko èišæenje, is a new way of saying genocide: the deliberate creation of a genetically “pure” society through elimination or displacement of a particular (or all but one) ethnic group. It was widely used by U.S. media in the early 1990s to describe ethnic conflagrations during the break-up of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but the concept is not new and dates back to at least the Second World War. A rabidly racist, anti-semitic, anti-hispanic computer game by this name was put on the market by Resistance Records in 2002—to be followed by sequels and another entire line of equally racist games. Thus the combination of cleansing and warfare can come early to young minds. Combined with such concepts as “creative destruction” and “surgical strike,” it can reinforce the idea of progress through warfare against “inferior races.”

Total War: The year 2000, we all recall, marked the shift to a radical U.S. administration. Video game buffs may also remember the year for a new series called Total War. The first game, Shogun: Total War was soon followed by Medieval:Total War; then Rome: Total War, Medieval II: Total War, and Spartan Total Warrior.

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war...our children will sing songs about us years from now (Richard Perle quoted in Pilger 2002: 9).

There was no greater influence on the present Bush’s Middle East policy than the shadowy Richard Perle whose advocacy for military involvement goes back a quarter century to when he was President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense. In 2004, his 17-year membership on the Defens Policy Board Advisory Committee (1997-2004) was finally terminated over conflict of interest problems related to his international military investments: Perle’s precarious balancing act had long given him the kind of swashbuckling mystique of the anti-hero, an image that once earned him the title, Prince of Darkness. Today, he sings a different tune: “…if I had been Delphic…I think now I would have said, No, let’s consider other strategies.” (Rose 2006). Whether his children will sing his epic song is uncertain.

The term total war is not a random choice of words: there are echoes from the past, especially from Prussian military history. The term was famously analyzed by the Prussian World War I general Erich Ludendorff in his book, Der totale Krieg (pub. 1935). The total war concept reflected novel circumstances--both technological and sociological--that had manifested themselves by the turn of the twentieth century when war waging required an extension of venue beyond the battle-field; indeed, the safety zone had disappeared as weapons took to the air; women (especially in the second world war) manned war plants; and the location of factories made many parts of residential areas military targets (see Chickering 2005).

Some of the ramifications are all too familiar today. In this scenario, “everyone is a combatant and anyone without a uniform may be suspect until proven loyal” (Braudy 461). Telling misleading tales becomes an essential part of war strategy, as Joseph Goebbels knew when he became Hitler’s first minister of propaganda. Trying to revitalize loyal followers after Stalingrad, Goebbels entreated his loyal followers: "The total war effort has become a matter of the entire German people." Despite relegation of women to kinder, (kuche, und kirche), he used humiliation to shame housewives into exchanging the home for the war plant or to "rethink household help" to free their maids for the purpose. Otherwise, "people will despise you" (Goebbels 1944/1998). As the behavior of all citizens concerns the government, contemporary total warriors demand control, not only of military operations, but also the media, library, campus and bedroom. Those disloyal to the team should feel shame. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Crusade: a religious interpretation of pacification--

"This crusade, this war on terrorism...." After 9/11, James Carroll, reacted with horror to President Bush’s image of a holy war that justifies: "… risks of world-historic proportioned disaster, since the ultimate outcome of such a conflict is to be measured not by actual consequences on this earth but by the earth-transcending will of God." Like Jonathan Schell, Carroll finds warfare today a dangerous illusion: "Our war on terrorism, before it is anything else, is thus an imagined conflict, taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond history" (2004:8).
Why then, was there no general outcry amongst the presumably large number of U.S. citizens who understood the danger of evoking such a shameful event almost on its millenial anniversary? We can easily imagine that many experienced a yearning on some level for purification, especially those most afflicted with American exceptionalism. As the newscasters chanted their mantra, “But it can’t happen here!” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell took advantage of the opportunity to humiliate their least favorite citizens: Yes, it can happen in New York City—to feminists, gays, members of the ACLU and People for the American Way.

PART II B:  AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
  How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pax Americana
         --Paul Wolfowitz

The title of Paul Wolfowitz’s contribution to Present Dangers (Kagan & Kristol 2000) parodies that of the Kubrick-Sellers film: Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. According to the political scientist Anne Norton, the title promotes the acceptance of nuclear warfare in the kind of coded message Leo Strauss believed ancient Greek philosophers devised to communicate with one another (2004: 192). Perhaps it was Wolfowitz’s bow to two University of Chicago professors, not only Strauss but also nuclear-war researcher Albert Wohlstetter whose RAND connection headed Wolfowitz toward government service .

The preponderance of “arms and the man” in pagan Rome explains why the Romans were less in need of “others” for their defense…(Strauss 1958/1978:205f).

The influence of Leo Srauss’s ideas on the present administration through his students (and students of students) has been well documented (Drury 1999, 1988/2005, and 2005).   Strauss’s  main themes—especially war as the norm to maintain an orderly society, and  rule by the few who manipulate (organize) the masses through “noble” lies (see  Schmitt and Shulsky 1999: 410) including the exploitation of religion and the refusal to negotiate with “others”—have provided credibility for contemporary doctrines .
 Especially relevant to the inhibiting capabilities we have posited for subliminal messages is Nicolas Xenos’s belief that Strauss’s most troubling influence is on discourse at large.  Xenos speaks of a “war of images” and points to examples of self-described liberals who promote the use of the word “tyranny” or approve of teaching “a new kind of patriotism” or join in the attack on campus liberals: “A fearful liberalism and a political and punditry elite have been fertile ground for Straussian seeding” (Xenos 2004).

 To be autonomous, militarily strong enough not to need “others”: that, in short, describes   U.S. international policy today.  The journalist/historian William Pfaff  recently pointed out that the U.S. justifies its aggressive military tactics, from preemptive war to torture “by making the claim that it possesses an exceptional status among nations…” (Pfaff 1970).  Most U.S citizens, in one way or another, have absorbed the founding narrative—the “discovery” of a “new world” and “chosen people” who,  tested by a hazardous crossing, tamed the wilderness by expanding the size and power of the country, from east to west, frontier to frontier.  Rationalized as Manifest Destiny, its main subliminal message is the identification of progress with growth, acquisition, materialism and associated sub-truths, including racism and determinism.  While the concept is not unique to this country, it seems to have  become a main feature of U.S. world view. Alan Dundes has identified it as a nation-wide “folk idea,” and points to the wide currency of such common expressions as “the sky’s the limit” and “there’s (plenty) more where that came from.”  He names this “the principle of unlimited good” (Dundes 1972: 96ff).  It is probably significant that the notion of progress grafted onto Darwinian evolutionary theory by the Englishman Herbert Spenser (who invented the term “survival of the fittest”) made the theory more acceptable on the American side of the ocean  than on his own (Hofstadter 1944/55: 39).

From settlement days to the present, the Roman analogy has proven to be wonderfully malleable; it can be used as a metaphor for pagan or Christian, triumph or failure, republic or empire. While the imperial model is exhilarating to some, it has become a grim cautionary fable to others (Murphy 2007).  The prescient historian Chalmers Johnson, who published Blowback the year before the World Trade Center was attacked, warned: "Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx."     Iraq became the 14th government to be overthrown by the United States in a 110-year span, something no “nation in modern history has done … so often, in so many places so far from its own shores”; the end of  U.S. imperialism may be headed for speed-up, too (Kinzer 2006).

Tom Englehardt describes the initial U.S. reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the kind of befuddlement and paralysis one would usually have associated with loss.”  In stark contrast, after the 9/11 attacks, he noted that the same officials came to life with startling speed and “… spooked a traumatized nation into a series of wars that were to make the United States the planet’s New Rome…. “In the process, they reintroduced  the old American tradition of triumphalism (“ victory culture”),and, especially relevant to our theme, brought back “much of its language and  many of its images” from the early glory days of Vietnam (Engelhardt 1995/2006).  By 2006, “Victory Culture” had disappeared, along with references to the New Rome.

As Jonathan Schell points out, the U.S. “could not be and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome because it cannot do what Rome did.”  Once again Schell points to the illusory nature of warfare in a nuclear age: “It cannot , in a post-imperial age, conquer other countries and absorb them into a great empire (Schell  2006).

Only by appreciating the depth of the subliminal truths associated with the acquisitive  definition of progress can we begin to understand the extent of the wrath  against a different kind of progress that came into prominence in the 1960s and some Americans  continue to champion.  Let’s go back in time to the days when these new ideas began to bear fruit.  

Challenging American Exceptionality--
 
 History--the founding--chosen people-multiculturalism—feminism--

South Africa had no history, y’know, until we came there; after all, they had no written document—South African professor

It was sometime in the early 1960s, and the visiting professor from South Africa was chatting during a reception held in his honor at a Connecticut college.  He was expressing the accepted view of the era—that time itself ceases to exist without written documentation. As I wrote later, “Much as certain European philosophers ‘bracketed’ the question of existence, social scientists, reacting against unproductive searches for authenticity or ultimate origins, have set aside the historical perspective in their areas of research” (Hopkins 1986: 35).  But there was beginning to be a break-through: “The problem now is to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture….The heretofore histories of remote islands deserve a place alongside the self-contemplation of the European past or the history of ‘civilizations’...” (Sahlins 1983: 534).  At a time when historians and social scientists had become painfully aware of cultural insularity, a crosscultural comprehension of history was beginning to evolve that depended upon a deeper and richer understanding of the transmission process itself: “Suddenly, there are all kinds of new things to consider” (Sahlins 534). He referred to fruit born from novel approaches to scholarship derived from the increasingly multicultural character of the campuses during the 1960s and 1970s; and Lawrence Levine similarly enthused that the new heterogeneity on campus produced “…a flowering of ideas and scholarly innovation unmatched in history” (Levine 1996:28).

Healthy nation-building myths [vs] Dangerous quests for the complicated truth--
--Richard Bernstein quoted in Levine 1996: 19f).

Not everyone was overjoyed. Indeed, the new ideas clashed with the U.S. founding myth. The New York Times columnist Richard Bernstein decried educators’ efforts to “demystify” Columbus, “our William the Conqueror, our Joan of Arc, our Alexander Nevsky,” in an attempt  to “replace healthy nation-building myths with dangerous quests for the complicated truth” (quoted in Levine 1996: 19f).  Allan Bloom wrote: “Cultural relativism succeeds in destroying the West’s universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it to be just another culture….The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life…..What makes its political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right to found a people...” (Bloom 1987: 39).

Bloom’s best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, was one of a series of publications, from the Reagan years to the present, to chant a constant litany of reaction; handsomely subsidized by right-wing foundations, they were usually given major review space in prominent periodicals.  Hot off the vanity press of the elite, these texts glowingly presented the case for resurrecting rigid moral codes, canons, family/societal/ national hierarchies—all from a “Western” perspective (as though the hemisphere—or the country—had ever consisted of a single culture).  They complained that multiculturalism reduces “Western culture” to an unexceptional state, only one amongst many cultures in the world.

The turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s brought a wide diversity of ethnicities and both genders to most campuses, largely accomplished by changing admissions criteria from privilege to merit. But it produced more than a diversity of students; they brought with them a broader range of different kinds of interests and knowledge and the self-confidence to promote these things as worthy of serious study. It interfered with the style of those who demanded complete professorial deference.  Paul Wolfowitz, as a Cornell undergraduate, was at least as much influenced by Allan Bloom as later at Chicago by Leo Strauss and the nuclear war theorist Alan Wohlstetter. At Cornell, Wolfowitz was one of Bloom''s "blossoms," as he called his cultish circle of male students who lived in the college he administered as Head Master. Leo Strauss called his circle of favored students "puppies" and apparently did nothing to stop the formation of what came to be called “Straussian truth squads,” bands of students who would interrupt classes to interrogate non-Straussian professors (Norton 2004: 58f and 44f).  Today, the organization, Campus Watch, is a successor. 

For professors who expected this kind of reverence, the new diversity was not welcome.  Allan Bloom yearned for the days when “A significant number of students used to arrive at the university physically and spiritually virginal…” and complained that Harvard, Yale and Princeton were no longer “…the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy" (89).  For some of us, however, it was an exciting time to be involved.  In 1965, R. Inslee Clark was brought to Yale University as director of undergraduate admissions. He instituted a more democratic policy, something accomplished through slashing the number of private school students from 50% to 38% of the Freshman class, offering more scholarship money and making intellectual merit a higher criterion than family ties (Lever and Schwartz 1971: 23ff).

I was teaching at Yale in 1968 during “Coeducation Week,” a demonstration by male students determined to open the doors to women, and I remember a sense of exhilaration when the administration responded favorably. Allan Bloom would not have approved of my assignment at the university: to structure a program in world music, i.e., to enlarge the scope of musical traditions taught beyond  central European elite music.  During the spring semester of 1970, a student strike that brought the entire university to a halt in support of Bobby Seale and the other Black Panthers who were being tried in a New Haven court. In response to student activism, however, the administration retracted  its liberal admissions policies, retreating to privilege over merit.  Messages in our faculty mailboxes  announced  new  rules to attract  “more alumnae children”: lowering the required grade point average and awarding  fewer scholarships would guarantee “safer students,” so we were informed.

The diverging societal views on campus were, in miniature, a harbinger of what we famously have come to know as a “culture war” in the United States (see Hunter 1992).
 
The Humiliated unexceptional--:
“I am male, white, Protestant and live in an upscale suburb. What have I got to contribute?” 

It was the 1970s: The anthropologist speaking these words had created a highly influential multicultural program; yet he admitted to feelings of guilt.  During the intervening years --as more and more attention has been given to the accomplishments of “others”-- some of his less thoughtful brothers have shown scant interest in meditating on the problem.  Their rhetoric often seems to display a kind of defiant hubris--of great danger because, as Donald C. Klein has pointed out, humiliation has the tendency to initiate a cycle:  “When it comes to humiliation, 'evil begets evil'” (Klein 2006: 66).  German citizens, smarting from resentment against World War I economic reprisals, were vulnerable to political mind-manipulation, quite ready to believe that their misery was due, not to practical difficulties, but to victimization for not being permitted to occupy the superior positions to which they felt entitled. Evelin Lindner concludes that Hitler’s unquestioning followers were enticed by a modern-day pied piper “… not as willing executioners but as willing partners in seduction” (2006: 81; emphasis in original; also see Klein 2006: 89ff). However, most German citizens, accustomed to a humble position in an hierarchical society, went about their daily routine unconcerned about the national humiliation inflicted upon them by the Treaty of Versailles---until Hitler “explained” the situation to them (2006:81). 

The real economic problems faced recently by many average American citizens have made them susceptible to “explanations.” In the official U.S. narrative, of course, the  “specter of Vietnam”  (not the outsourcing of jobs or nonexistence of health care) is the preferred Versaille shame for victimization. Thus, Americans were expected to feel proud at the end of the first  Gulf War because:
By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!
  --George H. W. Bush speaking to a group of legislators

The meaning of Vietnam syndrome has been turned upside down.  Originally used in reference to a pathological condition {Vietnam vets unable--Lady-Macbeth-like--to wash away guilt and anguish), it emerged from a Nixon-era laundering process as a dysfunctional inability to “give war a chance” (see O’Rourke 1992/1993)—another upside-down slogan that has turned John Lennon’s plaintive song into a mantra for the carnage that purifies. Thus, incessant rhetoric (aided and abetted by revisionist films as well as pop songs and video games) has created a new kind of exceptionality for the United States, a U.S.-as-victim legend, its citizens supposedly filled with shame for a nation that had justified Nixon’s worst fears and become a “helpless, pitiful giant.”

When news broke that humiliation was being used on detainees in Abu Ghraib, there was a sense of revulsion among those who had believed the war “would redeem America”: And most of all, we’d be welcomed as the Good Guys, putting to rest the shame of Vietnam.

Nathna Newman, the director of Agenda For Justice complains: “...Suddenly we are back in Vietnam, ashamed of our soldiers, ashamed of our political leaders who have put those soldiers in such terrible places that they’d do such terrible things” (NathanNewman.org: 20). As was the case in Nazi Germany, the seductive fantasies of exceptionality resonate with those citizens fighting the reality of economic hardship:
As a white male, I feel part of a group that has been singled out and victimized without cause.
-- National Coalition of Free Men

Over the past several decades, a new victim has emerged: White men, once unmarked in the linguistic sense, obtained a distinctive characteristic—that of being shunted aside for being privileged. Gradually, the distinction of victimhood has created a feeling of identity and a new discipline, whiteness studies.

The author of Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action blamed a Republican president,  Nixon, for extending affirmative action and thus “crippling the careers of white males” (Lynch 1989).  More recently, the Democratic President Clinton was called a hypocrite for expressing sympathy for victims of his own policies (Digbe 2003). In 2003, Donahue devoted a week of TV time to “Angry White Men".  The most powerful religion in the country convened a two-day conference  in Washington called “War on Christians and the Values Voters of 2006,” the first day of which was devoted to “persecution of Christians in the U.S. and Canada” (Cooperman 2006: A12). Some thrive on humiliation, actually provoking and perpetuating acts of humiliation to avenge the humiliation they have—or fancy they have--suffered.  “War and genocide may result when such personalities gain power and tap into the reservoir of frustration and humiliation among potential followers” (Lindner 2006; 140; 127ff). 

Victimhood, is a kind of exceptionality; it permits one to stand out from the crowd, perhaps even to extend one’s prominence beyond one’s mortal lifespan.  Yearning for notoriety not infrequently makes innocents claim guilt, as a frustrated criminal attorney recently testified. She was explaining the actions of John Mark Karr, the man who claimed to be the killer of JonBenet Ramsey. A friend of Karr explained: “He obsesses.  He wanted to be a rock star one time. He’s a dreamer.  He’s the kind of guy who wants to be famous” (Lacayo 2006; Sarche-a 2006 and Sarche-b 2006)

She-ocracy, feminazis, the Latino population breeds like rabbits, left-wing pinko vermin... (Savage Nation)

Perhaps Michael A. Weiner (popularly known as “Savage”) is the ultimate example of victim claiming; this king of airwaves bigotry who draws five million listeners on 300 radio stations, ascribes to affirmative action his failure to obtain a permanent academic position:  For here I was, a “manchild in the promised land,” denied my birthright  for matters of race.  Mr. Weiner holds a Ph.D.; interestingly, he chose “birthright” rather than certification for his argument.

Humiliation, especially the fear of it, is strong medicine; accepting humiliation—internalization of it—makes one ashamed of oneself.  The breach of obedience to any recognized authority can put someone in danger of humiliation, producing a fear so strong that many will act against conscience to avoid it. Clearly, the U.S. leadership today feels humiliated—and not just because of a past (and present) inglorious war effort but also because it has seen its  “rightful” dominant position threatened by rapid social change during the last half century.

PART II C:  BLOOD
--Bloodlines & biobabble—virginity—the unfit 10%--the absent mother—the undeserving poor

…this idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by “blood or birth or soil” but by “ideals” that must be taught and learned….  Demonstrably, this is false.   (Buchanan 2006: 145f).

 A people’s cultural level does not at any time… provide a standard for measuring the quality of the state in which it lives…. there is only one holiest  human right… to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure……….(Hitler 1925/71: 402)

Racism, of the Nazi, full-blooded type, is alive and well in 21st century U.S.A.  Buchanan, like Hitler, considers true citizenship a matter of “blood,” not “creedal ideals” like equality or democracy that an immigrant can learn.  Just as Adolf Hitler blamed open national boundaries for “poisonings of the blood” of his Master Race (Hitler 1925/71:396), Buchanan today promotes the construction of a 2,000 mile fence on the Mexican border “defining, sealing, and securing it for ever” (254) against an “invasion of…immigrants of another kind” (i.e., Mexicans) who are now on the point of causing “the death of the West” (Buchanan 2006: 270).   

Buchanan’s xenophobic harangue was fueled by the U.N.’s revised assessment of global population growth—a forecast of eventual depopulation that agrees with the long-range demographic trend predicted by Ben Wattenberg 20 years ago in Birth Dearth (1987).  The paleoconservative, isolationist Buchanan and the neoconservative Wattenberg hold opposing views on U.S. imperialism, and Wattenberg criticizes those who would put an end to immigration--indeed favoring the entrance of a limited number of Mexican immigrants.  However, the differences are more apparent than real: the United States, which Wattenberg calls “an exemplar nation,” is destined to lead the world; he explains that an “exemplar nation” needs a robust military—and praises the past record of Mexican foot soldiers (Wattenberg 2004).

Neither agree with environmentalists and social egalitarians who have been pleasantly surprised by the prospect of an eventually smaller planet (see Seager 2004).  Indeed both condemn what they see as selfish northern-European-type women making career choices instead of babies (of the right ethnicity).  State control over men’s and women’s bodies for military and demographic (i.e., racialist) policies is not a new story: it is where racism and classism meet sexism.  The philosopher Michel Foucault, in analyzing attempts over the past two centuries to incorporate sexual conduct into state political/economic systems, has pointed to a connection with the different varieties of racism that have erupted (Foucault 1978/1990: 26f).  A century after Theodore Roosevelt blamed “emancipated women’s willful sterility,” for “race suicide,” (Longman 2004), Patrick Buchanan wrote: 'Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry….(Buchanan 2002). 

Bloodlines, blood feuds, half bloods, pureblood, blood royal, bad blood, good blood, English blood, blueblood, red-blooded--

Blood is indeed an evocative word, and the subliminal truths it has disseminated over the years have often conveyed two biological fallacies—first, that blood is somehow integral to inheritance, and secondly, that the paternal “bloodline” is of major or sole importance in this process (Montagu 1997: 366f). One can understand the appeal to authoritarian governments; they have always been on the lookout for deterministic justification for human differences.  But Buchanan was old-fashioned in using the blood metaphor; recently, these associations come more commonly transmuted into what some biologists call the “gene myth”:

Genetic determinism is one of the most persistent myths in Western science.  I think it goes back to the idea of noble birth and bloodlines that must have helped ruling classes retain power within families
--- Mae-Wan Ho, biologist and Fellow of the National Genetics Foundation, 2005:

In 1994, James Watson, the first director of the Human Genome Project, discarded cold objectivity when he  rhapsodized: “We used to think that our fate was in the stars.  Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.” (Jaroff 1989: 67). Other biologists felt such expectations were exaggerated, based on what one called biobabble, and others termed  the Holy Grail of Genetics, the medical crystal ball, a Delphic Oracle, as well as the gene myth (Hubbard 1999; Nelkin 1995). In February, 2001, the project’s completion was announced: “The outcome of the Human Genome Project has spelled “the death of genetic determinism” (Ho 2001).  A similar undertaking by a private company—and in competition with the government’s HGP--came to the same conclusion at the same time; its director reported:  “The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code.  Our environments are critical….[Therefore] race is a social concept, not a scientific one “(quoted in Lewontin 2005).

Despite these findings, biological determinism in general and the “gene myth” in particular have not disappeared.  Watson, now the head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories,  spoke to a British film crew in 2000 about “the bottom ten percent” whom he labeled “stupid…I would call that a disease” (Black 2003: 442).  The very term “bottom ten percent,” of course, conjures up associations with the Nazi “Final Solution” and the U.S. sterilization program that directly influenced it.  At one time, during the first half of the twentieth century, Cold Spring Harbor was the center for eugenics experimentation in the U.S., a program that focused on “bettering” native stock by elimination of the “unfit ten percent” (Black 2003: 442).  Watson and the other scientists who believe in genetic enhancement are eagerly ushering in a “brave new world” in which, just as in Huxley’s novel, a fabricated concept of heredity could become the basis for the ultimate hierarchical system; not found in the natural world of biology, it is possible to achieve in the world of dollars and technology, a complete ranking of citizens, and control from prenatal existence until death.

--A Tangle of Humiliation--
Work opportunity—personal responsibility--Dependent—Welfare Queen—Nanny State—single moms—virgin—chastity—intact family-wage—dead-beat dads—illegitimate—

Why can’t you learn to keep your legs together?
  --social worker to Teresa Norton at routine welfare appointment

Welfare “reform” became law in 1996, and caused a nationwide exodus of students from public colleges.  More than 18,000 students (mostly single moms) had to drop out of the City University of New York (CUNY), forced to give up their dreams for a better future in favor of temporary, menial jobs (Lewis 1999; Emsellem 1997).  Teresa Norton (not her real name) was exceptionally fortunate in being able to continue studying for a degree at CUNY; she had received special permission to have her job as department secretary count as work toward public assistance.  A brilliant student and editor of the college paper, Norton was raising--not only her own two children--but a young niece as well.  Still, she had to put up with humiliation.  “I could not believe that a woman would talk to me like that,” Teresa told me.

I ask you, what am I?  I’m one of the undeserving poor, that’s what I am….But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s….I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more.  I don’t eat less hearty than him, and I drink a lot more. –Pygmalion

Thus George Bernard Shaw, through his character the Welshman Alfred Doolittle, ridiculed the ideology that the poor should be purer than the rest of us. In the play, Professor Higgins, impressed by the rustic philosopher’s eloquent common sense, introduces him to an American friend who invites him to give lectures in the new democracy; lionized by U.S. society, Doolittle inherits a small fortune from a rich American admirer--and, to his chagrin, has to adopt “middle class morality,” a state that includes marrying Eliza’s mother.
Shaw gave the United States too much credit. In fact, crafters of the first U.S. welfare legislation, “The Mothers’ Pension Program”--at about the same time the play was written--also had those deserving (white) widows (of noble military heroes) in mind, a circumstance that didn’t change until the Social Security program of 1935 shifted state largesse to federal benefits and support became more widely distributed.  Consternation set in when as increased numbers of African-American moms sought help in bringing up their families, increased agitation when it was broadcast that many were single, never-married mothers. Although there continued to be more white beneficiaries than black ones, the influx of African-Americans touched off a media blitz that has continued to evoke sexist-racist rhetoric.

 Sparked by images of Reagan’s “welfare queen” the teen-age single mom became the most demonized member of U.S. society. Charles Murray marvels at the nerve of the single mom who proposes, “Help me find a job and daycare for my children, and I will take care of the rest.”  In effect, Murray fumes, “she puts herself in the same category as the widow or the deserted wife—identifies herself as one of the most deserving of the deserving poor” (Murray 1984: 231). Murray’s co-authored book published just before welfare ”reform” became law, “proves” that the single mother is, not only the least deserving, but also the least intelligent because “having a baby without a husband is a dumb thing to do” (Herrnstein 1994). 

According to psychologist Stefan Ducat “anxious masculinity” has affected the U.S. political scene since the 1980 election when, right-wing propagandists successfully began to link liberalism to weakness, dependency, and helplessness—and made a connection to  “the emergence of the feminizing maternal menace of the welfare state, [Ronald Reagan’s}… great myth that our national nanny knows best.”  Ducat believes this line of thinking carried to “logical, if psychotic extreme” led to the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.”  Amongst the various government agencies it targeted was a day-care center:  “a very lethal, as well as bluntly symbolic assault on the ‘nanny state’” (Ducat 2004: 6).  Dependency in the United States, Ducat points out, is a subjective concept and has been increasingly regarded as a feminine condition—to be applauded in the case of wives, and derided in the case of single moms whose independence then becomes threatening. Curiously, he points out, it is never attributed to husbands of the stay-at-home wives who service them, or to what he calls “the other AFDC  (Aid For Dependent Corporations) (Ducat 2004: 187f).

The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut…. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 197)

Welfare “reform” has a pedigree. It was a practical implementation of a blueprint by Robert Rector (1995) who used the recommendations of Charles Murphy (1984) that depended upon Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s tangle of pathology theory (Moynihan 1967)--the name taken from sociologist Kenneth Clark and the concept a redo of  the “culture of poverty”  theories of Oscar Lewis, Edward Banfield, Franklin Frazier, and others.   Moynihan’s  Report, published in 1967,  presented the high-achieving African-American mother as emasculating her sons: The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut….U.S. society “presumes” male leadership in private and public affairs.  However, Moynihan seems not to have had generalships, but more modest military positions, in mind for African-American  youth—if only their overachieving moms wouldn’t stand in the way.  Like Wattenberg (as noted  above for Mexicans) he sees a win-win situation: more soldiers for the country and a disciplined life for youth who would profit especially from “a world without women; a world run by strong men of unquestionable authority…”(Moynihan 1967: 127ff).

Suddenly, the real difficulties experienced by inner city African-American men were not due to systemic social inadequacies (drug-ridden streets, unemployment, racial prejudice) but the result of “mother-headed” families--a convenient way to transfer social problems to the shoulders of the individual.  At a time when young men were unashamed to wear their hair long and shout: “Hell, no!  I won’t go,” it was useful to bring in what Stephan Ducat calls the “wimp factor.”   With one flourish of his pen, so to speak, Moynihan managed to humiliate both men and women in the African-American family—and to pit them against each other:  Neither the mother herself nor African-Americans in general could take pride in her success any longer--for wasn’t that very thing destroying her son?  Worst of all, he was now officially designated an “unmanly man” by the dominant culture openly flaunting its gender pathology as a natural right.

Moynihan is a hero to the social engineers manufacturing manly men today.  The complement to the concept of the male as essentially a military machine is the female as essentially a breeder, yes, the same mother that the manly man must escape from.  Let’s have a look at a dramatization of the approved role for (at least middle-class) women according to fundamentalist Christians today:

The Covenant of Purity and Protection--

Contemporary Christian evangelicals, trying to turn the clock back to a time when  female sexual ignorance was virtuous, have recently invented the “Purity Ball,” an elegant and costly  ritual that was performed in at least 40 states within the last year.   Tuxedoed dads escort their daughters (from about 9 or 10 years of age through teens) on the only date they are allowed to have before marriage—a sort of mock wedding ceremony replete with wedding cake, ring and formal dress. The dads—who are designated “high priests in their homes”—sign a “Covenant of Purity and Protection” as they slip “purity rings“ on their daughters’ fingers and vow to “war”  for the chastity of their “princesses.” The daughters pledge abstinence until marriage, and there is dancing with dad (Stange 2007). The images are all  recognizable: chastity as purity, the absent mother, the princess daughter, the high priest dad,  wedding cake and ring, a pledge, a test, fathers vowing to defend family honor with military allusions,  passive child-women ceding individual autonomy to their fathers  while waiting for the ever-after ending to each individual fairy-tale.

The Purity Ball is a dramatization of a sub-truth with a very long cultural pedigree: the paradoxical virgin-mother ideal.  It is implicit in the “ever-after” conclusions of most fairy tales and all those novels that end with the wedding, the end of chastity and purity for the heroine.  Literary analysts have puzzled over the “absent mother” theme in literature, and mom is conspicuously absent from the traditional Christian wedding ceremony.  The father gives the bride to the husband to whom she cedes her individual identity by assuming his name; there is an entourage of males and females in waiting—but no particular role for the mother of the bride.  Since her purpose in this society is to become a mother, the “princess” is adored for promising to put off what she is destined to become. “It is not hard to see how every fundamentalism is driven, at base, by a defense of purity.  And, for men in such a world, the feminine is often the greatest impurity that evokes the greatest anxiety.  Conscious and unconscious links are made between women (especially their bodies) and filth” (Ducat 2004: 219). 

Trickle-Up Morality—

One third of the U.S. HIV budget goes to public school courses that teach abstention from sex until marriage—and are only permitted to mention contraceptives negatively. These classes lack educational merit according to objective studies (including an investigation by Rep. Henry Waxman  in 2004 and recent evaluations by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and a team from Oxford University).  The texts include false biological information—e.g., that genital touching can result in pregnancy; ideology is presented as fact: e.g., a man needs “admiration” while a woman requires financial support. Children read a story about a princess whose prince left her for a village maiden because she didn’t hide her intellectual superiority.  Still, 88% of students in these programs eventually have sex before marriage, roughly the same as their peers.

In early March, 2007, Wade Horn, point man at the Department of Health and Human Sciences for supervising welfare “reform,” announced that he was extending abstinence education  to include adults from 18 to 29 years of age (Berkowitz 2005, 2007).  The moral crusade launched through welfare reform is being expanded to the general population—a case of trickle-up morality. The Guttmacher Institute responded  with disbelief; it had just published research showing that premarital sex has been the common experience of virtually all Americans for at least four decades (Finer 2007).

A New Hand-Maid’s Tale--

The target population for preconception health promotion is women, from menarche to menopause, who are capable of having children, even if they do not intend to conceive.  (U.S. Center for Disease Control, 2006)

Whenever a “pre-conception,” woman consults her private medical practitioner, she may expect to be questioned about her private life.  This document from the United States Center For Disease Control advises physicians to record the information so received in something called an “intervention”:  Do you smoke, drink wine?  Do you clean the cat’s litter box?  A physician responded online with disgust, pointing out that wine, in moderation, had been proven beneficial; in any case, he continued, it was not up to him to delve into people’s private affairs, adding that  he would not participate in something reminiscent of Nazi Germany.  To many persons, this action of the government also brought grim images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, the subject of her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Over the last six months, startled responses to the CDC report have been almost smothered in Googlesphere by paid advertisements for vitamin supplements for “pre-conception women,” vaccines that claim to protect diseases dangerous for “pre-conception women,” as well as government advisories on proper behavior for “pre-conception women.” If this perception of women becomes law, the equal rights amendment could never pass; Title IX and choice would be in jeopardy, seriously compromised by the legislated biological inequality of women.

If it were not so serious for the individuals involved, we could laugh at Mikado-like government fiats targeting intimate personal relationships.  But it is not so funny for the little girl whose (single) mom tries to enroll her in Head Start—only to find that they are no longer considered a family; or the little boy whose parents (whether heterosexual or gay) have never married and therefore are not eligible for federal housing; or state governors who find themselves in the foolish predicament of having to compete against each other for federal funding by raising marriage statistics or lowering out-of-wedlock figures; or for the father who having established a good relationship with the (custodial) mother of his child is dragged into court for not fulfilling his obligation to the system.

PART III:  SUMMARY

In sum, the three general subliminal truths examined in this article can be used to justify: warfare (Pacification, creative destruction, etc.).; ethnocentrism (American Exceptionalism); and, finally, discrimination (Bloodlines, pure blood,  etc.), the place, as noted above, where sexism meets racism. In different ways, these over-arching themes convey a necessity for purification, and perhaps that is at least partly the reason they often escape critical examination; purification, like humiliation, occupies a sensitive place in the human psyche. 

Purification is the theme of the numerous flood legends found in virtually all parts of the ancient world; it is at least as old as the story told by Utnapishtim in the Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh, (third millennium BC), an antecedent of the Noah tale among others.  It is also found in rebirth stories such as the phoenix bird myths of East Asia (sometimes used metaphorically by early Christians). Chastity (solely applied to women in most cases) has been considered a state of purity for at least as long as there have been patriarchal societies.

Mary Douglas has pointed out that the “final paradox” of the search for purification is that “it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction, but the experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction” (Douglas 1966: 200). The three sub-truths examined in this paper—along with the STs they generate-- indeed support Douglas’s point. All three lead to contradictions, at least as most people today would see it:  Warfare does not pacify, clean, create or mend; neither the United States nor any group within it has been chosen as especially noble. And lastly, a high valuation on female virginity usually leads to the paradoxical mother-virgin figure. 

The authoritarians who reject multiculturalism, international treaties, diverse family types, and the findings of scientists (re climate, evolution, and genetic determinism)—not to speak of “the complicated truth” are attempting to resurrect  the top-down view of the world in which inferiors must not only be humiliated but be forced to internalize the conviction “that they are responsible for the damage that they have brought upon themselves.” After all, “Convincing subordinates that they are responsible for their humiliation and deserving of shame diverts attention away from the actions of the dominant group” (Hartling 2004: 107).

Deterministic theories—whether supported by blood, genetics, standardized testing, or awe-inspiring graphs—are obviously useful in supplanting the complicated truth with simplicity itself: single moms are “dumb,” (Herrnstein and Murray), the “bottom ten percent” are “stupid,” (Watson), and “those crappy little countries” that need to be thrown against walls from time to time should “feel shame” for their “inability to keep pace” (Ledeen).  The “theater of war” has become a spectator sport with real persons’ lives sacrificed to the illusion of an American exceptionalism built on “limitless good.”

The U.S. cultural revolution of the 1960s, associated with a perceived loss of status in Vietnam, left some politicians and other members of elite groups grappling with the idea that they were victims of humiliation, feeling their privileged birthright slipping away from them.

From a human rights perspective, only certain claims for humiliation and demands for redress are deemed “legitimate,” but from both scholarly and pragmatic perspectives, it is unwise to label any such feelings as “right” or “wrong,”…because even if the injury is imaginary, the revenge is just as real (Lindler 2006:28).

To what extent their own desire for vengeance (as opposed to the lure of lucrative military investment) has driven U.S. leaders is similarly unimportant. However, the notion of revenge, combined with the national narrative many Americans imbibed with their mothers’ milk, can be expected to ward off, or at least mute, substantial criticism.  The main thrust of rightwing wrath has been levied at the sea-change in sexual mores, which, despite all the intimidating tactics of “trickle-up morality”(see above), has not been thwarted. Undoubtedly fueling this anger is a realization, despite the rhetoric, that a weakening allegiance to the authority of church and state--not moral laxity—is behind the continuing  rise in out-of-wedlock births, now reaching nearly four of every ten babies born in the U.S., a trend similar to the European one. U.S. teen pregnancies have hit an all-time low, indicating that decision by older partners, not the ignorance of children, is the main factor.  Are there signs that the bring-back-stigma crowd is beginning to have an effect on the hesitant?  I don’t know.  However, a new kind of plastic surgery called hymenoplasty (hymen reconstruction) has come into being, while some churches offer a less expensive solution to the shamed: temporary virginity.  

Sub-truths do not require fabrication to exist, but, in a society where propaganda has been raised to an art form, it is essential for citizens to acquire the intellectual tools to sift fact from fancy.  USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner, who used to teach at the National War College, conducted an investigation into the propaganda mill run by Donald Rumsfeld. He reported: “There were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people” (Gardiner 2003).  

“At present we are sleepwalking into one-man rule,” wrote Jonathan Schell  recently (Oct.8, 2007),  Humiliation seems to be propelling U.S. troops to march into yet another illusion: “surgical strikes” to pacify Iran, while even the.generals protest. A Democratic Congress refuses to cut funds for a reluctant Pentagon, adding to a national deficit only a billionaire could love. 

Yes, walkers have been walking away from obedience to church and state, and perhaps some are hesitant to admit just what a giant step that is.  Individual choice over institutional allegiance has always been an important part of the very definition of democracy; yet, in today’s political climate, it must be defended.  Of course, it does mean not being ashamed to question some assumptions with very old pedigrees.       

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