wotan15

Across the nation infants -- especially boys -- are smothered repeatedly in their cribs. Often it continues until the child is sufficiently motile to escape. Sometimes the children die, sometimes they live the rest of their lives in horror. Not a problem in America, though. Must be another syndrome � �Sudden Infant Death,� this time. Women�s liberation and the neo-matriarchal elevation of the feminine to deity has loosed upon the nation a Raging, Empowered Witch. With absolute spiritual supremacy and moral certitude she wreaks devastation, and those who gainsay her can expect swift and brutal retaliation.

Up Jumped the Devil

Only the threat of wholesale masculine annihilation will move the cowed, docile American male from subjugation, and stir Gretel to Hansel�s side.

You think Afghanistan�s a hassle? Worried about anthrax and smallpox? You ain�t seen nothin. Wotan�s coming. Talk about global warming!

Western women and men have done everything possible to ignore him, to forestall him, to deny him, to circumvent his inevitable concretization. But he�s coming anyway, to thrust his hand into the very Pit and reclaim our severed penises from the scary ladies in the Boulder Public Library. Until he arrives, we will descend the spirals of Hell, and the land will continue to Waste.

The great unreported fact of modern American life is that an entire generation of males has suffered, and is suffering, a catastrophic betrayal. Seeking survival, males are in full flight from females. That, however, does not sell newspapers, or ad time on T.V.

In 1996 Jinn magazine published a courageous and rare article called �Gender War Among Youth � At the Heart of America�s Calamity.� Columnist Sandy Close wrote, �More than race, class or turf, the male-female divide strikes me as the most critical fault-line crisscrossing the youth culture." Margaret Norris, a veteran teacher who works with kids from some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods of San Francisco, agrees. She describes Genderwar in appropriately stark terms: "Male-female relations these days aren�t love-hate," she says. "They�re pure hate.�

Grrrrl Power.

Close continues: �The irony is that almost every young woman I�ve interviewed from poor urban neighborhoods agrees that it�s harder to grow up as a boy than as a girl. Asked to draw up a pecking order for the world they inhabit, they describe women as haves and men as have-nots. The evidence is obvious: the mortality rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates � women also have greater access to welfare � as well as a reason to get up in the morning." [i.e., de facto female ownership of children]

�As raw examples of what happens when the relational texture of life literally rips apart, these young people offer the best example I know of where our collective culture is moving � they are the core of the American calamity.�

The �American calamity� is not that Genderwar is occurring. These antagonisms, stresses and injuries are eons in the making, and represent growing pains, freedom stretching its wings. The Calamity Jane is that Genderwar is being financed, spun and waged unilaterally against boys and men. Unilateral strife does not promote the marriage of the opposites in conuinctio. Instead, it intensifies the negative polarizations of the opposites, and concretizes subversive violence as reprisal for oppression and subjugation. Unilateral Genderwar merely reinforces the Good Female/ Evil Male scapegoat dynamic typical of infantile, dualistic thinking. It�s back to home, home on the range -- to yas'maam cowboy land. This funds and promotes regression to the matriarchal tactics of blood-vengeance and assumptions of female supremacy.

Genderwar�s saving grace is its eventual constellation of the authentic, free masculine, homo noeticus, Antinomial Man, Wotan.

Nor is Genderwar a lower-class phenomenon. Middle-class males � especially that scourge of the cosmos, the White Male � have been systematically whipped and betrayed for decades. Daily they become less secure, more fearful, with more internalized violence, typically expressed at one another, as in our ubiquitous road-rage incidents. The bizarre reality is that a �person of color� or female immigrant arriving in America yesterday has a citizenship status superior to an American-born white male, who may have risked his life in service of his country. Such collective injustices inevitably create and incite violent fringe groups seeking collective protection � the Aryan Brotherhood, Posse Comitatus, and so on.

Nor is Eminem and his ilk the cause of the �American calamity.� Eminem merely expresses the repressed voice of the silenced, emasculated young male, who looks around him and sees the feminine leading lives of privilege and protection, while he is disenfranchised, marginalized, and demeaned. Our schools, media, and government tell us this is not happening, even when we are faced with its reality each day. When external reality is discounted in favor of one�s self-serving personal or collective Spin, psychology call this a �psychotic break.� Psychosis is the state of journey through the underworld. It is dismemberment of psycho-social unity and wholeness into the splintered jigsaw puzzle of madness.