Sliding Doors

The momentous news that I should be leading with obviously is the anniversary of 9/11 and our marking of it in the now-traditional fashion, by declaring a new illegal war in Iraq. But that news gives me a great big giant sad, so I'm going to again invoke tradition and, the one probably closest to the core of the American soul, distract myself with loud, shiny media so I can pretend the bad stuff doesn't exist.

Except bleh, all the media stuff is about fucked up domestic violence and the concerted effort by one of the most deeply socially embedded, multidimensionally successful financial concerns going to cover it up. More sad. But at least I can tell who the bad guy is, so that's a better direction to go.

It's impossible not to take the national temperature on this, and maybe this is a bad sample as the people I'm about to cite are either prone or paid to put themselves in front of cameras before speaking so there may be some heavily skewed self-selection, but an undercurrent running through all this is: bitch had it coming.

I'm not going to post or link to the Ray Rice video, but what I don't get is that media types have been getting suspended off talking about this incorrectly for a couple of months already, and yet still everyone from high-profile athletes to the (Wo)Man on the Street are filling in the spaces in public forums (fora? I never really figured that out) with shoulder-shruggy "well, you never know..." Exactly the kind of false dichotomy argument style we've been trained in by the illusion of equal time on cable news for the past 15 years or so. I'd like to posit that it's at least possible that one side is right and the other is wrong and deserves to be shouted down, laughed at and dismissed.

Not every commentator has screwed this particular pooch, of course. CBS's affable NFL coverage studio host, the Harvard-educated and by-all-reports total mensch James Brown, did what grown-ups are supposed to do and put it into some kind of decent perspective, contextualizing the issue while simultaneously advocating not only for the victims exclusively but for an active program of change to lessen the instances of domestic violence where possible.

Speaking of context and perspective, the anti-victim backlash shouldn't be a surprise. The criticism of tougher anti-rape laws is that they'll lead to false accusations that could ruin some poor guy's life. The criticism of affirmative action is the dreaded-but-heretofore-noncorporeal Fox News bugbear or reverse discrimination. Even among the anti-vaccination crowd, the criticism is that it could lead to other negative health consequences up to and including autism, no matter how many times the CDC debunks it.

And what do all these have in common? The potential victimization of one dude (and let's go all the way and say mostly white dudes) is enough to derail any legislation or societal self-examination that might lead to the amelioration or elimination of the actual suffering of non-white people, non-men or non-white non-men. The fake-rape accusation will only affect men. The group given the least consideration by affirmative action would be straight white men. Autism occurs across genders and groups, but disproportionately affects white boys in this country. So all we ask is that we take your sexual assault, keep waiting for that job, fight through your rubella, shake off that left hook. If you don't, I as a white dude will be put in a position where I have to, like, worry about stuff. How's that fair?

It seems social, but like everything else, this shit gets political awfully quick. As stated, I'm a white dude. I'm the father of three white boys on the verge* of full-on white dude. A position has to be taken to either support the status quo, the one that privileges their whiteness as well as their dude-osity, or throw my lot in with the forces in action that will make the skids a little less well greased for them. My position continues to be that if things are a little harder for them than they were for me, we're probably going in the right direction.

Unless that direction is a furnace-blasted dystopian hellscape where it's harder for everybody what with the murderous competition for life-giving precious water and fighting off cannibal slaver gangs. I agree that would be more even overall, but I want to make sure it's clear that's not what I'm advocating. I'd hate for my comments to be misconstrued, as there seems to be a lot of that going around.

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*I mean in terms of age. None of them have exploited any of the proletariat as far as I know yet.