headhunters, and I don't mean job recruiters

This morning, I read a very interesting post written by Kamala Thiagarajan about a very interesting-sounding book. I have to admit my first reaction to the headline ("PHOTOS: The Vanishing Body Art Of A Tribe Of Onetime Headhunters") was most intriguing for the word photos and the preview photo at first, and I almost stopped reading after the caption under that preview picture:

Chingham Chatrahpa, 75, shows off his facial and neck tattoos. A face tattoo would be etched after a man's first headhunting expedition, usually at the age of 18-to-25 years. Only a warrior who decapitated an enemy could get a neck tattoo.

My first reaction, which prompted me to consider clicking away, was "maybe that's an art that should vanish." I kept reading, though, and was rewarded for it. The book and the blog piece were not about the vanishing art of headhunting, they were really about yet another vanishing indigenous community. And despite what the British viewed as savage behavior, and we still do today, there's a lot more to their culture than hunting heads.

Last year I heard a podcast about a different community descended from headhunters and a "new" emotion that was "discovered" by a couple of anthropologists who visited that tribe in the 60s. The tribe had one word for it, liget, and the best definition these anthropologists could come up with was "it makes me want to take a head."



Here's the accompanying blog post.

The rest of this is from my recollection, as I didn't re-listen to the podcast and only skimmed through the blog, and is littered with my subjective view of society and culture.

Liget was not rage or fury, which is the way that phrase sounds to a lot of us, it was about community and protection and grief... the feeling a parent has when a child dies suddenly and unfairly. In American culture this emotion is expressed in many ways, including rage and fury, but also often with a desire to protect others, to band together as a community (support or advocacy groups, friends and relatives, parents who also lost children in the same event, other kids who survived). It strikes me now, in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and the outpouring of what I think is liget which has followed, that we could sure use a better outlet for our liget than shouting at each other from across a political divide. I'm encouraged to have had several highly productive conversations with gun enthusiasts in the past month about finding common ground in this never-ending debate and to have seen the momentum continue up to today and hopefully at least through the midterms, because at the same time I'm discouraged by Congress' continuing lack of interest in finding a compromise that seems so ready for voters to support but which remains anathema to the NRA. Perhaps we would all be better off if we acknowledged we can learn from "savage" societies. After all, it's not like Europeans were free from savagery in any way, and certainly we've seen plenty of it in modern day America.

"The Red Pill" (quotation marks intended)

I just watched the movie The Red Pill [note italics] and I also just wrote a fairly lengthy review on Amazon:

First of all, this is a very ambitious and in many ways courageous movie to make. I'm glad it was made, and I think it does bring up some discussions that society should be having. I am a picture of privilege in our society, though—white, cis, male, educated, above-average income in my childhood home (in part due to two working parents)—and I resist the Men's Rights Movement now even more than I did before watching the film. Every complaint from the Men's Rights movement, no matter how legitimate (and some are, although not many), comes down to "men have it bad, too, so we should eliminate any progress women have made on that front." For example, (nearly) as many men are domestically abused as women*, so we shouldn't spend so much effort taking care of the abused women.

* If you believe the statistics cited, which at least one person interviewed in the movie did not. That same person is the only one who made the point that if the statistics are true, the solution should be to spend twice as much money on helping domestic violence victims.

There's also an enormous dose (to the point of overdose for me) of two-wrongs-make-a-right thinking. I reached the point of nearly vomiting when Elam's writing suggesting we have a month to beat up "violent bitches" is justified because he was responding to a feminist piece about beating up violent men.

The filmmaker herself had dialog with many people she did not agree with, but I don't remember her showing any dialog between feminists and so-called MRAs. She showed them shouting at each other a few times, but edited it such that the men always came off as being more calm and reasonable about the argument. It would be a more interesting movie to get some of these people who were shouting at each other, lock them in a comfortable room with cameras and microphones, and tell them you can come out after neither of you has shouted for 30 minutes. If they decide to sit in silence of 30 minutes, try again until you get two of them to talk to each other. The solution the MRAs offer is still one of us vs them when in fact we need a masculism movement which is not against feminism but is instead a male counterpart to it. That way more of us, no matter our gender or anything other identifies, can move on and get to a humanism movement. Then we'll be getting somewhere.

Honestly, I only gave this movie as many as 3 stars because I admire the filmmaker's willingness and desire to make it. The discussion is important to have, but it needs to be a dialog, not two monologues.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1761D74KFG2NZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B06XGY67WQ

There's more to say, though. Elam says early in the movie (and I'm paraphrasing) that trying to understand any part of his platform in isolation from the other parts is like trying to understand a snow drift by looking at each of the snow flakes individually. OK, so I'm trying to see the whole picture you've created. The whole picture that I see is that men have it worse than women and we have been oppressed by feminism. We work more dangerous jobs, die more in the military, lose out in custody battles, are fraudulently inflicted with fatherhood at times and illegally denied our paternal rights at other times, are victims of rape and domestic violence. Sure. All of these things are true. But they're not fighting to get the more rights for you. They're fighting to level the playing field even if that means denying women the rights they have been fighting for since, well, at least since the suffragette movement. That's the whole snowdrift, Mr. Elam, like it or not.

The red pill is such a beautiful metaphor, I hate to see it co-opted by the so-called Men's Right's Movement. One person's red pill is another's blue pill in this case. The men who use this term think they are waking up to reality instead of going back to sleep into the "comfort" of feminism. Feminists of the 60s and 70s (the feminists of my parents' generation and, I think, also the feminists of my generation in the 80s and early 90s) were clearly consuming a red pill and inviting everyone to join them. Many of us today are still inviting others to consume that very same red pill, then along comes a group of broflakes who tell us that red pill is actually blue and if I won't admit that it's red I'm the one who's sexist. Wake up, fellas, you have the power to make many of the changes you want to see in your lives. You have the power to engage in dialog with feminists instead of dismissing them. You have the power to build a genuine masculism which is not in opposition to, but in concert with, feminism to make a better society for all of us. Wake up.

feeling like writing…

I'm home from walking the dogs. As is often the case, the rest of the family is asleep (including the dogs, who tend to fall asleep after a drink of water and a treat—can dogs having a late-night snack be said to be "#bumsteading?" For that matter, what is "#bumsteading?" I haven't defined that one on this blog yet. I don't think. #Bumsteading is a practice of a late-night snack that's often far too large and possibly decadent than is really healthy right before bed. Named after Dagwood Bumstead, of course, the namesake of the Dagwood Sandwich. I tried for a little while to get the trend going on social media, but I think the closest I came was a friend who uses it now frequently, but not with the #. Oh, well, I guess the 15 minutes of social media fame Andy Warhol promised me is still to come.) But I digress. As is my common practice when I'm in this sort of mood. What sort of mood? Well, it's the kind of mood where I feel like writing instead or reading or watching or listening. Usually that means my brain is too scattered to focus on outside stimuli. But today is a different feeling than just that. Like I said, I'm only a tiny bit manic. But what I am is kinda zombified. Allergens in our backyard have conspired to make sure none of us really sleep well, so I'm tired. There are other contributors, but not worth going into right now. My brain isn't like Lightning McQueen today, buzzing around at a million miles an hour in every different direction at once, it's more like a zombie, one of the slow zombies, but not a totally brain dead one—like a Warm Bodies zombie, maybe? I'm not sure, it's been awhile since I saw that movie, and even then I only saw it and didn't hear it because I was mixing Foley for it. Oh, snap another digression. I guess I'm in a combo kind of day, like a Semi-Smart Zombie Lightning McQueen.

Well, to quote Douglas Adams' Humpback whale falling into the planet Magrathea, "have I built up any coherent picture of things? No."

And now I've pretty much tapped all the energy I had for writing in making that video clip out of the radio show, because the one in the movie that I found on youtube just isn't as good and I couldn't figure out how to post audio only on this blog. Pity. (The radio show is my absolute favorite telling of that story. I've heard it well over 100 times by now and I've only read the book a handful of times, never really got into the BBC TV series, and was one of the few fans who liked the movie even though it couldn't hold a candle to the radio play.)

Charlottesville

This Vice News piece has some really shocking footage.  We still don't know the full story, and perhaps the full story is actually unknowable. Another thing worth noting about Trump's press conference hissy-fit yesterday was that he made it clear he doesn't have any information the media doesn't have. That's either a lie and betrays a cover-up of what he does know, or it's frightening. 

That's a tangent, though. This video and all the evidence I've seen so far clearly does show at least two sides engaging in violence. Who "started" it? Was the violence of at least one side justified? I don't know. Another thing I can be fairly certain of is the alt-reich is ruled by fear (and anger but for me, anger is generally an expression of fear). As for the alt-reich nutbags complaining about being ruled an unlawful protest because of the actions of a handful of instigators, all I can say is wah-wah, you poor broflakes—I've been in a permitted protest ruled unlawful because of a few instigators. It happens. Get over it. 

And speaking of tangents, well, that's exactly what happened to us at the DNC free speech zone in 2000. My beef was not with the anarchists who refused to get down off the fence—I wouldn't have done it, but I didn't begrudge them their own protest. The police were right to call us all an unlawful protest, though. I was disappointed when they unplugged Ozomatli, glad to see them doing what they always do and "taking their message to the streets" (their words). My beef was the LAPD as we dispersed. And even more offense was the media praising them for averting a riot. The only riot that was threatening to start there was theirs. They broke up a genuinely non-violent protest. They told us to disperse and to use one particular exit from the zone. When we were "attempting to comply with their order," mounted police officers armed with tear gas and beanbag bullets chased us back in the exit they had told us to use. Fortunately I and my friends made it out of the other exit they had told us not to use and we managed to avoid any serious exposure to tear gas and any "non-lethal" bullets flying through the crowd. Did anyone fire "non-lethal" bullets at the Alt-Right broflakes in Charlottesville? I haven't heard any reports of it. Would they have fired back with lethal bullets? They certainly brag as though they would have. 

I do acknowledge that there are at least two sides to any fight except a few rare exceptions. (Most notable are Bull Connor vs. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnamese government vs. the Buddhist monks.) This video clearly shows this is not one of those cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm still vehemently anti-confederacy and anti-Nazi. I still condemn Trump's message of "many sides" to this story, applaud his scripted comments on Monday, and condemn the organizers of this protest—which was, in their own words, "not a non-violent protest." (Well, maybe I'm paraphrasing, I don't especially want to watch the video again just to confirm that statement.) I also condemn anyone who *instigated* violence no matter what their justification for doing it. I haven't seen enough to know who instigated what, and I'm not especially interested in discussing opinions on that point. I invite my Republican friends to simply condemn that violence and white nationalism without trying to blame anyone else for it. 

last one awake in the house....

I was going to watch some TV or maybe a movie. The house is asleep, or at least on their way to asleep, and I'm up. This happens a lot in our house. I don't know whether I actually need less sleep than my family or if I'm just running a bigger sleep deficit, but whatever the reason, I'm up. I usually watch TV, sometimes tool around social networks, very rarely read a book—you know, the old fashioned way with paper and bindings and (nowadays) reading glasses? But tonight I'm writing. Sure, I did a little stream-surfing, some social networking before I got here, and there's no guarantee I won't tab away as soon as I see a (1) in one of those tabs, but I'm here now. (Well, actually I went through a few tabs in the middle of writing that sentence, but I'm back. For now.)

So why do I write? The one rule of being a writer is to write and you can see as well as I can how often I do that on this blog. (Here, I'll save you the clicks and counting and stuff: not very often.) If you see me on the social networks, too, hopefully you've noticed how carefully I compose many of my postings and I do that daily. OK, hourly. Minutely? Is that a thing? But maybe I'm kidding myself, maybe you read my posts or this blog and you think, yeah, this dude is not a writer. Although probably not if you're reading the blog. I mean, why would you read a blog in this day and age if you didn't have at least some interest in either the writing style or the content? And since I basically have no content, or at least none I'm aware of, it must be the style. Not that I know who you are or even how many of you there are. I'm not interested in analytics so I've never really figured out what the different numbers they show me on the back end mean. That's not why I'm here. I'm here to write and throw it out there. I'm not even interested in whether it sticks. I guess I feel more than a little self-indulgent with that, but there it is. Honesty.

Yeah, I got sucked down the social network rabbit hole. Interesting conversation about micro- and macro-economics with an elementary school friend I haven't talked to since Jimmy Carter was President. Well... maybe once or twice during the Reagan years. In fact, I think we were at a party together once, but my memory is a little vague on that night. Hmmm, wonder why.

random writings while waiting for the oatmeal

Oatmeal is simmering, my family is happily reading, and I'm tired of reading news of fresh disasters on my phone, so I'm going to write something. I don't know what it'll be yet, and I don't have much time.

Before I resorted to my phone (handier int he kitchen than a hard-cover book), I was reading John Le Carré's memoir The Pigeon Tunnels—which is fantastic, by the way. Specifically, a chapter about the last days of Phnom Penh before it fell to the Khmer Rouge. There was a wonderful anecdote (possibly true) about a woman who took a whole pack of orphaned children in to the American Consulate demanding passports for them all. When she was asked where their mothers were, she said "I am their mother." When further questioned about how she could be the mother of so many children roughly the same age, she said "I had a lot of quadruplets." According to the legend, the wink and nod worked and she got the children out.

Then I got to my phone and there was a story about what's happening in the Philippines right now, IS fighters taking over a city on the one majority-muslim island (or one of the few ones?) in the nation, Mindanao. It makes me want to fly over there and adopt a lot of quadruplets.

Alright, oatmeal is ready and family is hungry.

Best. Birthday. Ever.

Well... the title may be a bit hyperbolic. After all, I haven't conducted an exhaustive review of all 48 previous birthdays (that count includes my 0th birthday for the math nerds out there), but today was the best I can remember. Many who are reading this know that my 48th year was not my favorite year. To those who don't know that, it may come as no surprise anyway: mid-life crisis (or mid-life change or transition or male menopause or The Change or whatever you want to call it) often hits guys around this age. So there's that. Fathers often feel a bit of the same emotional transition, too, regardless of their own age. And only a select few of you (all people I know IRW) know the full extent of how hard that has hit me this year. I'd rather not go into details now, but just rest assured it's been a helluva ride for me. Then there's my mother-in-law dying this year. That was a whopper. She passed about two weeks after my birthday last year and it hit me much harder than I gave it credit for at the time. I was expecting to need to be there to support my wife when she lost her mother. And her brother, and our son who lost his Gheegi, but I was not expecting it to hit me so hard personally. And it did. Yeah howdy, it sure did. Then there's the "enough already, 2016" phenomenon that's been so well covered by social media: the loss of seminal artists I respect deeply like David Bowie, Prince, Carrie Fisher, and so many others. I think one of the reasons this year's crop of dying celebrities hit social networks so hard is that this is really the first big wave of the seminal artists of "m-m-m-my generation, babe" to die of old age. (Hopefully Roger Daltry and Pete Townshend will still be around for awhile so we can sing that song without busting out in tears--due respect to John Entwhistle and of course Keith Moon, may they both rest in peace.)

Anyway, you get the point. My 48th year sucked. Enough said.

Today starts my 49th year, and I really hope the awesomeness of the celebration is indicative of an awesome year. Really, the celebration started last night. I was a mess yesterday. Stressed out and overwhelmed by that stress. Not a pretty picture. My most darling wife, Kathleen--my biggest supporter this year--swooped in and took care of business, getting dinner on the table (usually my "job"), taking more than her share of the responsibility getting our kid to bed, and showing me nothing but love and support the whole time. When I woke up today, the world looked brighter even before Kathleen and our son chimed in wishing me a happy birthday. Then Kathleen made me breakfast (again, usually my "job" in the mornings), which included delicious waffles, fresh strawberries, and bacon. That's right, a woman who hasn't eaten bacon since she was about 7 years old made me bacon, as she has done every year on my birthday. Cooking bacon is a full-body experience, and she is not the kind of non-pork eater who sneaks a bit of bacon now and then, she just plain doesn't like it. And yet she covers herself with bacon-grease splatters and stinks up the whole house with bacon smell for me every year. If that's not gonna make a guy feel special, I don't know what is. And that was all before 8am.

I don't always work on my birthday even when it does fall mid-week, but this year we had no choice, so we were on the Foley stage all day finishing off the footsteps and getting back into some props we didn't finish last week. Kathleen, yes the same Kathleen who cooked me bacon, walked some of the best Foley I've heard in a long time. Like probably since she did the gun sound for an actor who clearly wasn't comfortable holding a gun. I'm telling you, after she did that Foley, the guy looked badass with that gun in his hand. I still don't know how she did it, but she did. Well, today was even more impressive than that. We'll share more about the details when the movie is released (or maybe near release), but let's just say there's a prop that is generally considered an inanimate object by most people but which the director wants to come alive. Today it came alive for me. Kathleen did that. What a gift!

And then, and then! My 1st cousin had a baby today, so the latest member of our son's generation was born on my birthday. That's pretty cool. Thanks, Tova, for having your baby today!

Oh, yeah, then there's dinner. I got to make dinner tonight, and I love making dinner. I've been fine-tuning my chicken noodle soup (from scratch) recipe, and I think tonight's was the best I've made yet. And if Kathleen and Sorren disagreed with that assessment, they were kind enough to keep that to themselves. :D But AFTER dinner came the most awesome birthday cake, a gateau, beautifully designed, and presented with 4 candles to indicate decades (including BB8 and Kylo Ren candles, woah) and a big, fat 8. Such great presentation, complete with a pillow dance (from our boy) and, of course, a song (from both of them).

I also got a batch of delightful emails, too many facebook birthday greetings for me to respond to today, a balloon and edible arrangment from my mom (combine that with the gateau and our eating habits, and we've got dessert for a week!) and so very much love and goodness throughout the day.

Wow. I'm floored. Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you, son. Thanks, mom and dad. Thanks to everyone.