The World Doesn’t Need Superman
I recently sat to watch the movie Superman Returns, again. A movie like this, because of the archetypal and symbolic role play, causes a cathartic mood leaving me with puzzling questions about the nature of masculinity. The character of Superman himself is puzzling to me. As a super being, I would have thought him to have better communication skills. In my view, what most men would experience as strife at being assigned an absentee father role seems to result from an inability to communicate in the original, from deeper questions of self. It is from the position of the original, we enter an invisible rite of passage that either disenfranchises and disconnects us from youth, or introduces us to the migrating event of our next organic progression – our maturity. It is here that the script will direct us as human beings or human doings. Khalil, as he is called in the original, is dealing with the biological imperative that he may be the last of his kind. His immediate solution was coitus with Lois Lane. After all, an objective solution is the shortest route back into our implied purpose of doing, where a subjective discovery although less corporeal could give us our being. This is a first gesture towards personal fulfillment in which the original Khalil, struggles against his simulated identities of doing, those of Clark Kent and Superman. It is only in his fortress of solitude that Khalil is identified and mentored by recorded shadows and crystal memories. It is an act of subjective individuality to leave the script of doing the “saviour”, travel through dark space alone to discover the context of his origin to know Khalil.
As polite and tolerable, Clark Kent follows a script of behaviour that allows him to fit in. He animates himself using the exact opposite of invulnerability. Why? With only glasses and a suit as his disguise, he is really hiding within perception, using the perception of others as the real disguise. Animating or acting to provide an appropriate illusion, he collaborates with the beliefs of others to achieve a persona that is self-sustaining. He is simulating simulacra, or is he? In this collaboration, who is free to change it, refine it or end it? The collaboration of a simulation may be the fundamental expression of our non-verbal language, the hive brain or concordantly the matrix. If simulation is the safest haven for our fears and vulnerabilities, who is free to change it?
It is in group think that a collective consciousness establishes a simulation, as a chaos of collective beliefs. The chaos of group beliefs orders or organises into an acceptable expression of group think, with attached roles, individual utility and purpose. By similarity it may well describe your family and mine it also describes street gangs, corporations, priesthoods and ideologies. So powerful is a simulation and it’s collaboration it can be impenetrable to challenge. Priesthoods sanctify crime, police protect their own hegemony politicians subvert freedom children are killed in the crucible of context, ideologies script truth. It is the result of beliefs in a simulation, a collaboration of purpose. The spirit and ghost of the group and it’s simulation neither fears nor answers to the wrath or judgement of deities. It is so intense as to be hypnotic, it is where people cocoon for safety and establish a reality. It is the ideology of the group, the simulation that is coldest to the individual. It is an imperialism of consciousness, seeking new real estate, speaking on behalf of you as it, testing your orientation with half spoken messages for you to complete, pitting the subjective against the objective, nurture against nature and darkness against light.
Extending this to my own life begs the question as to whether I am fulfilling the simulations in which I am performing. As a foster child in my youth residing in foster homes and boys homes I am very familiar with shifting from one simulation to the next and the doings required. I am astute at recognizing that the happiness most people describe is nothing more than happiness at surviving the simulation and getting away with it. Very quickly communication can change from conversation to a statement of purpose. Once adequately indoctrinated into the simulation, individuality slips away into a netherworld of phantasm and fear. As a younger man I had read a book by Carlos Castaneda called A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I found it to be a sort of “rite of passage” book for males, supporting a mentor and student scenario. In one exchange the mentor Don Juan tells his student Carlos that “life is an impersonal experience”. Understanding this statement may be one of very few tools to assist in surviving the eviction from your simulation. It is those evicted from their lives who against their will or desire, come to know how impersonal life is, while searching a new simulation.
Simulacrum is certainly a defining aspect of the gender dialogue if it can be called a dialogue. The simulation of masculinity itself has been and is being reshaped into a diverse product selection that ranges from conscripted killer to cuckold to criminal. Change to male consciousness is promoted in a much more aggressive process than empowering. Fuelled by a simulation of misandry the legislative and legal machinations in our society are furthering a cause that renders many men emasculated from their previous and current simulations. You may attempt an amendment to the truth with another study of whatever truth you are seeking to define, the truth industry is always for hire. Or you may attempt to amend the truth at the top of your lungs. You may battle the tentacles of simulated truth or buy her flowers. But you will not defeat the simulation or it’s ghost, without defeating yourself.
So pervasive is the effort to reshape the male paradigm, to own the simulation, the corporate branding and marketability, the very existence of maleness and it’s utility, that a war of control has been mounted on males of every age group. The war against the youngest of males, those most vulnerable, our sons, has been carried out with the use of psycho active drugs. Between 1960 and 2010 and particularly since the advent of a diagnosis referred to as “attention deficit disorder” the drug Ritalin has been added to the arsenal of feminist simulation to advance their war against a “patriarchy of mass destruction”, to find where it is hidden. During these fifty years the prescription of this drug to our sons has increased 700 fold and in comparison to girls at a rate of 4 to 1 . Together with a social policy called zero tolerance that redefines educators as behaviour police males are being shown the exit door to their own epigenetic experience.
A book with a unique perspective called “Freakonomics” by authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, carries a by line on the cover that reads, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”. In their book the authors suggest a correlation between legalized abortion in the U.S. and the reduction in projected and actual crime rates during the Clinton Presidency. It is interesting and controversial, certainly an unexpected hypothesis of available statistics. It is a stark contrast to the claims of the politically motivated who may only seek to enlarge their cache of stem cells. Not unlike the beauty products produced with the harvested foreskin of circumcised male infants. There is however a disturbing resonance in such a hypothesis that may be pertinent to a current crisis that has been highlighted and somewhat publicised but otherwise ignored. The as yet unstudied correlation between the drugging of our sons with the psycho active drug Ritalin, a drug known to atrophy the brain with prolonged use, and the subsequent decline in College enrolment of our young men?
It is unequivocal that there is a war mounted and ongoing against males. The protagonist in this war is represented by a disembodied ideology claiming injuries actual, intended and implied. Based on de facto beliefs in the physics of size, it mires our sensibilities such that we are able to identify the criminal before the event of the crime with primary aggressor laws. So insidious is this notion, that by simply typing the term “silver bullet technique” into Google, of the 499,000 results returned, the first result describes the most effective method to winning a divorce dispute, is too make the primary aggressor law work for you.
Statistical evidence has been shaped with contrived studies and unasked questions that only now are being challenged with intellectual honesty and a new found integrity within academia. Still from the battlefield we are yet to reveal or accept the true violence expressed in this war. Violence by proxy has been served by police batons, tasers, policy and legislative prejudice.Families and futures washed away by a masculo/feminist chivalry expressed from affordable and safe positions of power, tenured in wealth and socio-political esteem. We reside in the sphere of a police state that sees only one crime, maleness, evidenced only by gender it is maleness that is sentenced to not exist. No doubt these murderers of the masculine would and have responded with an age old reply. “Am I my brother’s keeper”? As men are ground into the fodder of social engineering under the thumb of law to redecorate the Patriarchy with Matriarchy one wonders. Is it worth the gender-cide to validate an accusation of privilege?
