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#replace 'toxic masculinity' with 'police violence'
comicbookuniversity · 5 years
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How Black Lagoon Begins Attacking Gender Norms
by Bunnypwn Gold
Rei Hiroe’s Black Lagoon is one of the most intelligent, fun, and kinetic action-crime dramas around. The entire series looks and feels like an action movie; even the way it’s structured feels more akin to a series of movies, with different self-contained arcs building off of the previous installments. While many action movies include philosophical elements and dialogue in an attempt to make the festival of blood and explosions seem more intelligent without exploring the issues, Black Lagoon actively builds its themes and the substance of its plot and character arcs around its stellar action-hero philosophy quotes. One of its strongest points is how integral all the characters’ social identities are to the way the story is told. Chief among these is the way gender is explored and examined. Looking through the first five stories of the series, a powerful message about breaking out of the toxic gender binary is developed, creating an argument that drives the rest of the series. This argument is never made explicitly, but instead through the pattern of behaviors exhibited by Japanese salaryman Rock, as the feminine, and hotshot gunslinger Revy, as the masculine.
For anyone who has not read the series, a little catch-up is in order. At the beginning, Okajima Rokuro, a generic Japanese salaryman, is kidnapped by Revy, the gunhand of Lagoon Traders, a company of underworld couriers. Rokuro was in possession of a disc the Lagoon Traders were hired to steal, and Revy wanted to sweeten the pay with some ransom. During a shootout with mercenaries hired by Rokuro’s company and a chase to certain death, Rokuro goes from wanting to return to his ordinary life, to finding out his bosses are planning to let him die, and finally to diving into the underworld as a crewman aboard the Black Lagoon, taking up the nickname Rock. He then spends the first few stories of the series being taught how to perform basic duties and tasks aboard the torpedo boat by Revy until they have a falling out and make up after a dramatic argument. It is this series of events that sets up the larger dialogue on gender in the rest of the series.  
In an interview published for Sunday GX magazine and printed in volume 8, series author Rei Hiroe and Gen Urobuchi, author of the Black Lagoon novelization, discuss their views on gender in light of the series’ myriad badass women. In it, Urobuchi is quoted as saying,
“I naturally have this idea that women are strong or tough. Like men are just male bees—creatures that should die after they ejaculate…In that sense men are weak. Whereas the battle begins for women once they get pregnant…Women have to keep fighting. I don’t see that kind of strength as cute. I can’t dote on it.”
Later on, when discussing the final scene of The Wild Bunch, in which the heroic cowboys go off to their deaths trying to save their friends, Hiroe and Urobuchi have the following exchange:
Hiroe: “They’re already dead at that point. That’s what’s so cool. They have no intention of getting out alive.”
Urobuchi: “That’s really the only moment men can compete with women, I think. There’d have to be a third world war for men to shine. Like a Mad Max type of world. Maybe only when there’s a real danger of extinction will men have a role. Right now this society could exist only with women.”
This lays out the core of the series’ argument about gender: women are strong because they fight to live and make life, whereas men place all their value on their own deaths and the deaths of others, and the current gender binary denies women their strength and forces them into submission with the violence of death-based masculinity. This is somewhat familiar, since associations between the genders and life and death in this vein are common across cultures. What is particularly instructive for how the series is constructed is how the machismo, male-dominant view of gender is embedded in action movies, particularly cowboy movies. For anyone who has read Black Lagoon, it’s clear how powerful an influence cowboy and other action movies have on the series.
Rock spent his life as a low-level employee in a large Japanese company. Like most companies around the world, large Japanese corporations like the one Rock worked for are male-dominated and are typified by traditional ideals of masculinity, with the CEO and board of directors, among others, working in the role of powerful, great men, and everyone under them working their way closer to that great ideal of manhood. Rock, being so low in the company, is far from manhood, in that sense; he describes his job as mostly consisting of bowing to superiors, and his general conciliatory, subservient attitude throughout the early part of the series can easily be read as traditionally feminine. From that perspective, his time at that company can be read as emasculating (for more on the idea of emasculating corporate culture and men trying to take back their manhood with violence, see Fight Club). Rock even reveals that he would blow off steam at a batting cage, which is a notably phallic activity, with bats and balls, and, being a sport-based hobby, is more traditionally masculine by nature; in a sense, after constantly kissing ass and being forced to get drunk to keep his bosses happy, he recharged his masculinity by knocking his stress into the far end of the cage.
Revy, on the other hand, fits perfectly into macho-violent cowboy movie masculinity during the first set of stories. If she had been replaced by a man, then superficially the story could have been told the same way, with the only difference being that Rock would likely have been a little less shocked to see Two Hand smile while he killed all those mercenaries. She’s short-tempered, mean, constantly looks out for herself before anyone else, and is just so indignant that she has to take orders from anyone. She’s greedy and aggressive and takes great joy in both risking her life and taking the lives of others. Throughout the first few stories, Revy often complains that every little thing Rock does wrong costs her money, and she’s not particularly generous with her own. Though she continues this throughout the rest of the series, and so it isn’t specific to this period, the fact that Revy is most often seen in her downtime looking at porno magazines promising the largest-breasted women around drives home the kind of macho, hypermasculine role she fills. We later learn that she grew up on the streets of NYC, having to run from street criminals and violent police officers. She would take up the gun at age 11 and begin emulating the only kind of power she knew up to that point: the violent men who terrorized her. Her worldview is defined by this dog-eat-dog attitude, with people being nothing more than dead bodies waiting to happen and profit from. She’s so scared of showing vulnerability and anything that could be seen as feminine because the last time she was vulnerable and feminine, she was nearly killed in the gutter by dirty cops.
The pilot chapter of the series sets out to demonstrate the gendered positions of Rock and Revy. Revy starts off the chapter by messing up her boss Dutch’s plan by kidnapping Rock for extra cash. She is then indignant when Dutch reprimands her for this, because she was trying to take initiative and be independent, masculine qualities often praised at companies such as the one Rock worked for. Rock spends all his time whining, or as Revy calls it, “bitching,” about what’s going on, being very demanding, and wanting everyone to take care of everything for him, all of which puts him in a stereotypically feminine role, and a negative one at that. At the bar, Revy belittles Rock’s manhood for drinking beer, saying rum “is what a real man drinks,” and ends up in a drinking contest, because Rock has to prove he’s a man despite his feminine role and Revy, as a “real man,” can’t back down. Revy then demonstrates her penchant for and love of violence as she kills a bunch of the EO mercenaries hired by Rock’s company to kill them and retrieve the disc, just living her best life. The turn for Rock in this chapter is when he talks to his boss and finds out he plans to let Rock die; the company leaders will reward his death with their presence at his funeral, showing the masculine value of death and the power of the executives’ masculinity that their presence is meant to be that great a reward. As the mercenaries chase the Lagoon into the straits, Revy demonstrates her masculine lack of regard for her own life by nonchalantly resigning herself to death. Rock, on the other hand, embraces the opportunity to take up the masculinity his company denied him by devising an insane plan to win the day. After coming out on top and choosing to join the Lagoon, however, that masculinity starts to change for Rock. By choosing to join the Lagoon, Rock was choosing that as his way of life, not simply the place he was willing to die. For Revy’s part, it’s easy to read the way she relishes her part in Rock’s plan as a cowboy choosing to die how she lived, but it can also be read as her accepting a way to fight to stay alive in the way she sees best, which is itself an important turn for Revy. These points are developed further in the rest of the opening of the series.
Throughout the next four stories, Rock remains at the low end of the totem pole, still receiving his training and unsure of how he will actually make his living on the Lagoon, placing him in a similarly feminine position as he was in as the errand boy in a large corporation. Revy emphasizes this with her masculine sense of inherent authority, constantly bossing Rock around and belittling him for failing to learn sailing knots faster or not checking his scuba gear thoroughly. Revy also buys Rock a Hawaiian shirt, which is never seen because Rock refuses to wear it. While buying clothes for a man may be seen as feminine, it more resembles Revy trying to institute a work uniform, since she got it to replace the semi-formal work clothes Rock still wears; it should be noted that Benny, the Lagoon’s engineer and another man who takes a passive position in the crew, wears a Hawaiian shirt. Revy’s masculine position is further solidified in Ring-Ding Ship Chase, the second story, when she single-handedly took out several motorboats filled with heavily-armed men and mounted with machine guns. Rasta-Blasta, the third story, pushes in another direction, with Revy taking a masculine approach to watching over Garcia, the young boy they’re transporting for sale, by threatening to beat and kill him when he won’t comply with orders. Revy’s role can be read as either paternal disciplinarian or like a cowboy angry because kids, which she never wanted, cramp her style. Rock takes on the maternal role in how he deals with Garcia in that story, being more gentle and nurturing. Later on, Rock tries to stop Revy and ass-kicking terrorist-turned-maid Roberta from fighting to the death partly in an attempt to protect them as women, because he still thinks like how things work in Japan. But of course, Revy has to fight Roberta, because, as a “real man,” she can’t stop before things are settled.
Die Rückkehr des Alders, the fourth story, represents the major turning point in this opening arc. During their mission to salvage a Nazi painting from a sunken German sub, Revy leaves Rock behind for a moment to take medals and things from the dead soldiers so she can make a little extra money on the side. Rock takes a stand, saying she should leave them behind. While taking a stand can be read as masculine, Rock does so in defense of what the medals meant to the soldiers, and how those sentiments are more valuable than whatever money can be made from them, essentially taking a feminine position in support of life and love. The fact that Rock backs down by the end is what really does in any hope of this being a masculine moment for Rock. Revy, on the other hand, lays out the bare bones of her cowboy “we’re dead men walking” mentality, pushing herself further into the macho corner. Here is where she reveals what her childhood was like and argues that the bones in the sub and the medals were essentially the same: just things. There’s no value in things like sentiment, which people build lives around. She’s literally placing monetary value on the deaths of Nazi soldiers, the starkest version of her masculinity. She continues when raiding the neo-Nazi ship by killing everyone she sees, including the hired staff who were unaffiliated with the neo-Nazis. When she kills them, she doesn’t have her usual smile, a sign of how her desire to remain in this powerful role is stressing her, how it’s not really bringing her a happy life.
The big conclusion happens in the follow-up story Calm Down Two Men, which sees Revy and Rock going on a simple errand run and then getting lunch. During the errand run, both demonstrate their typical patterns of behavior. Rock is more submissive, just trying to get along, and Revy is aggressive and angry, using violence as her way of handling business. Their roles here play out fine enough with the first two errands, but Revy nearly gets them into a shootout at the Rip-Off Church before Rock saves the day with some diplomacy. Revy is put on edge as Sister Yolanda tells Revy to learn from Rock, which would disrupt her status and position in multiple ways. At lunch, they get into an argument which ultimately dispels the tension left between them after their time in the sub. It is instigated by Rock, who is taking a stand for his principles, a stand that demonstrates his new masculinity. Revy tries to take control back quickly by threatening to shoot Rock dead, since she refuses to be put onto the defensive, which she would interpret as a weak, vulnerable feminine position. Rock redirects the gun and later takes a punch without flinching to show that he can’t be stopped with violence. Rock speaks here about how he got by at work before, and how Revy inspired him by showing how much more he could have in life. This scares Revy, putting her on the defensive, to hear someone demonstrate how hollow and insignificant the power she was wielding truly was. Eventually, Revy sees that Rock is actually offering her something more powerful in exchange and takes him up on it. To sum up Rock’s offer, “Well, if there aren’t any Robin Hoods…then BE a Robin Hood,” meaning take a stand for the principles you want to uphold in life. Before the chapter is out, Revy asks Rock if he’s with her or against her, just like in the sub, in an attempt to place her new path near her familiar ground. Rock doesn’t allow her that simplicity.
In this way, the two switch places in their gender roles by the conclusion of this opening arc, but do so in a way that breaks them free from the stereotypical gender binary. Just as Urobuchi put it, Rock has fully formed his new, life-affirming masculinity by the end of the argument, while Revy is only just starting to chart the course of her new, powerful femininity; to complete the parallel to sex described by Urobuchi, Revy and Rock smoke after their fight and “kiss” their cigarettes to light Revy’s. The argument fully demonstrates how the old gender binary our heroes left behind was damaging to each of them, with Rock left emasculated and, more importantly, unable to live life his own way because of how he always came up short of expectations, and Revy being a tightly-wound ball of self-destructive anger and violence doomed to leave this world without having really gotten anything out of it. Overall, it’s a clever, subtle, and effective way to demonstrate why traditional gender roles are harmful and degrading to all involved. While, as a nonbinary person, I have to point out it still is based on a binary view of gender, it’s still an interesting way to demonstrate how breaking free from the traditional gender binary is empowering and can redefine the course of a person’s life for the better.
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yogaposesfortwo · 4 years
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Decolonizing the Black Male Body Through Yoga
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As a boy, especially a black boy, the policing of your body begins as soon as you’re taught that you simply are a boy. Boys walk this manner and girls walk that way. Boys can’t switch their hips. Boys can’t roll their backs. Boys can’t move their bodies like girls can.
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To move the black-boy body untethered to the stiff, oppressive weight of hyper masculinity is to maneuver sort of a girl, which, in our heteronormative, misogynistic society, means moving your body inconsistent thereupon of a second banana . Men, so our toxically masculine world teaches us, are to essentially move as physically unattuned creatures whose limbs don’t relax or move gracefully. Thank God I liberated myself from that imprisoning mindset after I finished my first vinyasa class quite a year ago. For me, yoga isn’t merely about flexing my muscles into positions that are unexplored—it’s far more . When my feet touch the mat, it's an act of resistance. An act of loving myself enough to maneuver during a way that feels good, regardless of what proportion it clashes with misconstrued gender norms. The Power of Yoga I celebrate that liberation with my yoga instructor, James Roberts, several times every week at black-owned And Yoga Studios in Brooklyn. And Yoga's space provides a liberating environment where I can live and celebrate blackness. Replicas of Basquiat’s portraits line the walls and R&B plays quietly while we practice. Robert’s classes usually started at 6:30 a.m. (before stay-at-home orders, of course)—relatively early on behalf of me to be sitting on a yoga block centering my mind and body. Now, students meet via Zoom classes later within the mornings and evenings. Before COVID-19 ravaged the planet and made us indoors, i used to be at And Yoga Studios four to 5 times every week . a minimum of three of these sessions were with James. His caring touch moved my unsure postures into focus, into the proper direction. Without realizing it within the moment, his touch dismantled the faux belief I grew up thereupon black male intimacy was harsh and hard. Toxic masculinity features a way of teaching us that movements like those we see in yoga are feminine. Of course, such thinking is ignorant and that i knew it intellectually. Physically, on the opposite hand, I had tons of growing to try to to . If you struggle to understand why I feel such a release, or a way of freedom, practicing yoga with a Black man , you likely don’t appreciate how pervasive hyper-masculinity is—especially how brutally the black human body is policed. Black men aren’t alleged to touch one another with care or emotional intimacy. Growing up as a black boy, we’re taught that when it involves interactions with other boys, anything beyond rough, aggressive play might be interpreted as sexual. My uncles played rough with me so i might not be considered “a punk” or “weak.” A slap over the top or a pulled punch to the chest during aggressive horseplay was a loving way of callusing my body against the rough and tumble streets of Detroit, where I grew up within the 1980s and ’90s. These gestures also served as protection against racism . Black boys growing up in Detroit couldn't afford to precise emotional intimacy and be in tune with our bodies in ways in which could signal us as prey. My uncles loved me the simplest way they knew how. But until I stepped on my first yoga mat in 2018, I had been living under the tremendous weight of an oppressed body and mind. It took four months to finally try Robert’s class once I started practicing at And Yoga Studios, a choice I made just because of my schedule. Up until then, I had only been comfortable with women (preferably black women) leading my practice. While my body was slowly growing attuned to the vinyasa movements, I felt uncomfortable when another man laid hands on me.
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Physical Liberation
I was hesitant for Robert, or any man for that matter, to the touch my body, because I wasn’t conditioned to believe that men might be the source of healing and luxury . But I grew to trust him. Robert, day by day, month by month, and now, after a year, has shown me that a man’s touch can help liberate my mind and body. This physical liberation didn’t begin with yoga, however. I first had to clear my mind of toxic black masculinity in therapy in 2013, after I planned to require my very own life thanks to unresolved childhood trauma. Through therapy, i used to be ready to excavate the painful memories and experiences with violence from my pre-teen years growing up during a home where drug use and dealing were prevalent. In therapy, I learned that seeing my uncles beaten an in. of their lives and walking past the blood-sprayed stairwell for weeks resulting from his beatings from rival drug dealers were traumatic experiences, among other violence I witnessed. Over two years, I learned that men could, in fact, cry about the pain they experienced which it had been OK that I could not “man up” and toughen my skin to suppress the memories of decades past. Men, i used to be taught, don’t show emotion. We just affect it—which, of course, we never do. We don’t get in-tuned with our feelings. Mentally, therapy helped me to know that. After two years of therapy, i used to be seeking a replacement sense of liberation and decided to undertake yoga. I started off with female therapists because I saw black men lacking the requisite tenderness to assist me navigate the pain i used to be experiencing. It took some encouragement from my therapist to trust a male psychiatrist. That distrust of men carried over to yoga where it took me a couple of months to trust men to steer my practice. Robert, without even knowing it, was the primary man to assist me liberate my body by simply leading me through vinyasa flows. Because I learned to trust him, I’ve been ready to trust my body to maneuver with the liberty and beauty I didn't anticipate feeling after I first started my practice quite a year ago. 3 times every week , I walked 12 minutes to feel Robert’s liberating hands move my body into new positions that prepare me for the day ahead. COVID-19 has yogis inside now, but i'm still practicing yoga alone and thru streaming. My yoga journey started long before I met Robert, but I’m grateful for his very unintentional guidance of helping free my body of the toxic masculinity that permits it to maneuver more freely than it ever had before. Author: Terrell Jermaine Starr Source: https://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/decolonizing-the-black-male-body-through-yoga Discover more info about Yoga Poses for Two People here: Yoga Poses for Two Read the full article
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crimethinc · 5 years
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Kavanaugh Shouldn’t Be on the Supreme Court. Neither Should Anyone Else.
Last week, millions watched the dramatic hearings pitting Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh against Christine Blasey Ford, who courageously narrated her experience of being sexually assaulted by him decades ago. Once again, Americans were confronted with the brazen entitlement of the male power establishment. The hearings stirred up traumatic memories for countless survivors, ratcheted up partisan tensions, and catalyzed furious responses from feminists and progressives in view of the implications of the court shifting further to the right. With Roe v. Wade hanging in the balance, critics point out the horrifying irony of an unrepentant sexual predator potentially casting the deciding vote to block abortion access to millions of women and others across the country.
We applaud the courage of Christine Blasey Ford and everyone who has supported her through this ordeal. We don’t want to see Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, either. But should any man be able to wield that much power over the lives of millions?
What if the Trump administration manages to find a judge with the same views, but with no history of sexual assault? Would that render the confirmation process legitimate and their decisions of the Supreme Court beyond question? Should people of conscience accept the sovereignty of a nine-person elite over the most intimate spheres of their lives?
If you don’t think so either, you may already be an anarchist.
What does it look like to resist the nexus of rape culture and far-right power that Kavanaugh represents? The usual suspects propose the conventional solutions: calling representatives, canvassing for Democrats, taking to the streets to hold signs indicating our displeasure. But even if these efforts forestall Kavanaugh’s nomination this time around, they won’t disrupt the relations of power in which hundreds of millions are held hostage to the machinations of a small, mostly male elite. A victory against this particular nominee would only reset the clock; eventually, Trump will force through a new candidate who will rule the same way Kavanaugh intends to. And even if Trump is impeached or a Democrat is elected and a progressive nominee is sworn in—we’re still in the same place we started, vulnerable to the whims of a judicial aristocracy and alienated from our own power and potential. We need an approach that challenges the foundations of the system that put us in this situation in the first place.
Meanwhile, progressive critics such as Amy Goodman have demanded an FBI investigation as a way to give official weight to Ford’s testimony and hopefully discredit Kavanaugh as a candidate. Goodman points out, reasonably, that Trump’s claim to be in favor of law enforcement while hesitating to order the FBI to look into Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct reveals his hypocrisy. This logic positions progressives and feminists as the honest proponents of law enforcement—and police as protectors of women. Have we learned nothing from decades of rape crisis organizers explaining how the police and courts so often serve to retraumatize survivors, putting them on trial rather than those who attacked them? Can we ignore the feminists of color from INCITE to Angela Davis who call on us to remember that police and prisons do not stop rape but rather intensify poverty, racism, and injustice?
Democrats are trying to recast themselves as the real “law and order” candidates. This is not so much a change in strategy as a revealing of their true colors. Between the blue of “blue states” and the blue of “blue lives matter,” it’s only a matter of tone, not content.
In TV newsrooms and around water coolers across the country, the discussions about this case have focused on how “believable” or “credible” Ford’s testimony is versus that of Kavanaugh. Taking this approach, we become an entire nation of judges and juries, debating evidence and scrutinizing witnesses, choosing whose experience to legitimize and whose to reject. This adversarial framework has always benefitted those who wield privilege and hold institutionalized power. Even if we rule in favor of Ford, we are reproducing the logic of a legal system based in patriarchal notions of truth, judgment, and objectivity, a way of understanding reality that has always suppressed the voices and experiences of the marginalized, preserving the conditions that enable powerful men to sexually abuse others with impunity.
Unfortunately, calls for FBI investigations reinforce this logic and legitimize the murderous regime of surveillance, policing, and prisons as a means of obtaining justice rather than a source of harm. Rejecting the rape culture that Kavanaugh and his supporters represent necessarily means rejecting the patriarchal institutions through which they wield power. If we legitimize any of those institutions in the course of trying to be pragmatic in our efforts to discredit specific officials, we will only undercut our efforts: one step forward, two steps back.
This has broader implications for how we address rape culture in general. When we reduce the issue of sexual violence to the question of whether specific men have committed sexual assault or abuse, we frame these as crimes carried out in a vacuum by deviant individuals. As a result, entertainment corporations and government agencies can pretend to solve the problem by finding men who do not have sexual assaults on their record rather than addressing the misogynistic dynamics and power imbalances that are inherent in government, the workplace, and society at large. This confuses the social question of addressing sexual violence with the matter of finding candidates and nominees who can present a clean résumé; should they later turn out to also be implicated in doing harm, they can be replaced, just as the electoral system replaces politicians every few years without ever giving the rest of us self-determination.
Rape, abuse, and other forms of violence are a systemic problem within our society, not a matter of individual deviance. We need a way of addressing rape culture that cuts to the root.
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So is a woman’s place in the government…
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…or in the revolution? Can we have it both ways?
Are there other ways that we can think about how to respond to the threat that a judge like Kavanaugh poses to our bodies and communities?
As anarchists, we reject the idea that judges or politicians deserve the authority to determine the course of our lives. Rather than only trying to pressure leaders to vote one way or the other in a winner-take-all system that reduces us to spectators in the decisions that affect us, we propose solutions based in direct action: taking power back into our hands by enacting our needs and solving our problems ourselves, without representatives.
As long as legislators and judges can determine the scope of our reproductive options, our bodies and lives will be subject to the shifting winds of politics rather than our own immediate needs and values. Instead of validating their authority by limiting ourselves to calling for better legislators and judges, we should organize to secure and defend the means to make decisions regarding what we do with our bodies regardless of what courts or legislators decree.
In practice, this could mean networking with health workers who have the necessary skills, and sharing them widely; stockpiling and manufacturing the supplies we need for all sorts of health care; defending spaces where we can operate our own clinics; fundraising resources to secure access to health care and birth control options for all, regardless of ability to pay; and developing models for reproductive autonomy that draw on past precedents but address our current problems. We can do our best to render the decisions of would-be patriarchs like Kavanaugh irrelevant.
All this has already happened before. For example, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the Jane network, a vast clandestine effort centered in Chicago, provided illegal abortions to thousands of women. The fact that abortion was already accessible to so many women was a major factor in compelling the US court system to finally legalize abortion access in order to be able to regulate it. The most effective way to pressure the authorities to permit us access to the resources and care that we need is to present them with a fait accompli. Unfortunately, when it comes to standing up to elites like the Supreme Court and the police who enforce its decisions, there are no shortcuts.
We can extend the logic of direct action to every area in which a right-wing Supreme Court might inflict harm, from environmental destruction to indigenous sovereignty to labor organizing. All of the rights we have today are derived from the grassroots struggles of ordinary people who came before us, not from the wisdom or generosity of powerful officials.
FBI investigations and court processes will not end sexual violence or bring healing to survivors. To strike at the root causes that enable the Kavanaughs of the world to do harm, we have to tear up patriarchy and toxic masculinity by the roots. This involves a process of ongoing education around sexuality, consent, and relationships, developing strategies to intervene when we see violence of any kind in our communities, creating culture that models alternative visions of gender and intimacy, and reimagining justice as restorative and transformative rather than adversarial.
We can see how pervasive the problem is when we look at the narratives that underpin support for Kavanaugh. Leading up to the hearings, supporters focused on portraying Kavanaugh as a devoted family man. As multiple allegations of sexual assault surfaced, many commentators framed the question as a contradiction between Kavanaugh the loving husband and father and Kavanaugh the callous rapist, implying that these roles are mutually exclusive. Yet gendered violence continues at epidemic levels within proper heterosexual families; shocking rates of spousal rape and domestic violence permeate American marriages, while statistics on child sexual abuse indicate that family members make up a substantial proportion of abusers. Bill Cosby, the archetypical television husband and father, was recently sentenced to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting numerous women. The false assumption that a history of sexual assault is somehow incompatible with adhering to the conventions of heterosexual family life reflects the persistence of patriarchal norms and homophobia, as well as a refusal to honestly address the extent of gendered violence in our society.
No Supreme Court could solve this problem, even if it consisted of the nine wisest and gentlest people in the world. When it comes to social change, there’s no substitute for widespread grassroots action.
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Family men and rapists are not mutually exclusive.
Some American feminists have drawn parallels between the Kavanaugh case and the #NotHim movement in Brazil, in which women are rallying against a Trump-esque misogynist politician running for president.
The struggle of Brazilian feminists to resist the extreme-right threat deserves our attention and support. Yet as anarchists, we can take that model further in responding to the Kavanaugh nomination. Rather than Not Him, we can assert Not Anyone—no man, rapist or not, deserves the power to decide the reproductive options for millions of women and others. Perhaps the more appropriate slogan for the struggle against patriarchy and the Supreme Court would be the rallying cry of Argentina’s 2002 rebellion: “Que se vayan todos!”—get rid of all of them. They all must go.
The sooner we can do this—the more we can delegitimize the authority of Supreme Courts to shape our lives, and the more powerful and creative we can make our our alternatives—the less we will have to fear from the Trumps and Kavanaughs of the world. Let’s build a society that enables everyone to engage in genuine self-determination—in which no man can decide what all of us may do with our bodies—in which no state can take away our power to shape our future.
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Further Reading
Fuck Abuse, Kill Power: Addressing the Root Causes of Sexual Harassment and Assault
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anagamitofotografia · 3 years
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News and important updates on POS System Equipment & POS.
Scenes from The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne and set during the Texas-Indian Wars. The film is considered one of the most influential Westerns ever made.  
“It just so happens we be Texicans,” says Mrs. Jorgensen, an older woman wearing her blond hair in a tight bun, to rough-and-tumble cowboy Ethan Edwards in the 1956 film The Searchers. Mrs. Jorgensen, played by Olive Carey, and Edwards, played by John Wayne, sit on a porch facing the settling dusk sky, alone in a landscape that is empty as far as the eye can see: a sweeping desert vista painted with bright orange Technicolor. Set in 1868, the film lays out a particular telling of Texas history, one in which the land isn’t a fine or good place yet. But, with the help of white settlers willing to sacrifice everything, it’s a place where civilization will take root. Nearly 90 years after the events depicted in the film, audiences would come to theaters and celebrate those sacrifices. 
“A Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for 100 more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever,” Mrs. Jorgensen goes on. “Someday this country’s going to be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” 
There’s a subtext in these lines that destabilizes the Western’s moral center, a politeness deployed by Jorgensen that keeps her from naming what the main characters in the film see as their real enemies: Indians. 
In the film, the Comanche chief, Scar, has killed the Jorgensens’ son and Edwards’ family, and abducted his niece. Edwards and the rest of Company A of the Texas Rangers must find her. Their quest takes them across the most treacherous stretches of desert, a visually rich landscape that’s both glorious in its beauty and perilous given the presence of Comanche and other Indigenous people. In the world of the Western, brutality is banal, the dramatic landscape a backdrop for danger where innocent pioneers forge a civilization in the heart of darkness.
The themes of the Western are embodied by figures like Edwards: As a Texas Ranger, he represents the heroism of no-holds-barred policing that justifies conquest and colonization. While the real Texas Rangers’ history of extreme violence against communities of color is well-documented, in the film version, these frontier figures, like the Texas Rangers in The Searchers or in the long-running television show The Lone Ranger, have always been portrayed as sympathetic characters. Edwards is a cowboy with both a libertarian, “frontier justice” vigilante ethic and a badge that puts the law on his side, and stories in the Western are understood to be about the arc of justice: where the handsome, idealized male protagonist sets things right in a lawless, uncivilized land. 
The Western has long been built on myths that both obscure and promote a history of racism, imperialism, toxic masculinity, and violent colonialism. For Westerns set in Texas, histories of slavery and dispossession are even more deeply buried. Yet the genre endures. Through period dramas and contemporary neo-Westerns, Hollywood continues to churn out films about the West. Even with contemporary pressures, the Western refuses to transform from a medium tied to profoundly conservative, nation-building narratives to one that’s truly capable of centering those long victimized and villainized: Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and women characters. Rooted in a country of contested visions, and a deep-seated tradition of denial, no film genre remains as quintessentially American, and Texan, as the Western, and none is quite so difficult to change.
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With origins in the dime and pulp novels of the late 19th century, the Western first took to the big screen in the silent film era. The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 short, was perhaps the genre’s first celluloid hit, but 1939’s Stagecoach, starring Wayne, ushered in a new era of critical attention, as well as huge commercial success. Chronicling the perilous journey of a group of strangers riding together through dangerous Apache territory in a horse-drawn carriage, Stagecoach is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential Westerns of all time. It propelled Wayne to stardom.
During the genre’s golden age of the 1950s, more Westerns were produced than films of any other genre. Later in the 1960s, the heroic cowboy character—like Edwards in The Searchers—grew more complex and morally ambiguous. Known as “revisionist Westerns,” the films of this era looked back at cinematic and character traditions with a more critical eye. For example, director Sam Peckinpah, known for The Wild Bunch (1969), interrogated corruption and violence in society, while subgenres like spaghetti Westerns, named because most were directed by Italians, eschewed classic conventions by playing up the dramatics through extra gunfighting and new musical styles and creating narratives outside of the historical context. Think Clint Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
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The Great Train Robbery (1903), a short silent film, was perhaps the first iconic Western.
In the wake of the anti-war movement and the return of the last U.S. combat forces from Vietnam in 1973, Westerns began to decline, replaced by sci-fi action films like Star Wars (1977). But in the 1990s, they saw a bit of rebirth, with Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western epic Dances With Wolves (1990) and Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And today, directors like the Coen brothers (No Country for Old Men, True Grit) and Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario) are keeping the genre alive with neo-Westerns set in modern times.
Still, the Old West looms large, says cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin. Today’s Western filmmakers know they are part of a tradition and take the task seriously, even the irreverent ones like Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino called Django Unchained (2012) a spaghetti Western and, at the same time, “a Southern.” Tarantino knows that the genre, like much of American film, is about violence, and specifically racialized violence: The film, set in Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, flips the script by putting the gun in the hand of a freed slave. 
Slotkin has written a series of books that examine the myth of the frontier and says that stories set there are drawn from history, which gives them the authority of being history. “A myth is an imaginative way of playing with a problem and trying to figure out where you draw lines, and when it’s right to draw lines,” he says. But the way history is made into mythology is all about who’s telling the story. 
Slotkin’s work purports that the logic of westward expansion is, when boiled down to its basic components, “regeneration through violence.” Put simply: Kill or die. The very premise of the settling of the West is genocide. Settler colonialism functions this way; the elimination of Native people is its foundation. It’s impossible to talk about the history of the American West and of Texas without talking about violent displacement and expropriation. 
“The Western dug its own hole,” says Adam Piron, a film programmer at the Sundance Indigenous Institute and a member of the Kiowa and Mohawk tribes. In his view, the perspectives of Indigenous people will always be difficult to express through a form tied to the myth of the frontier. Indigenous filmmakers working in Hollywood who seek to dismantle these representations, Piron says, often end up “cleaning somebody else’s mess … And you spend a lot of time explaining yourself, justifying why you’re telling this story.”
While the Western presents a highly manufactured, racist, and imperialist version of U.S. history, in Texas, the myth of exceptionalism is particularly glorified, perpetuating the belief that Texas cowboys, settlers, and lawmen are more independent, macho, and free than anywhere else. Texas was an especially large slave state, yet African Americans almost never appear in Texas-based Westerns, a further denial of histories. In The Searchers, Edwards’ commitment to the white supremacist values of the South is even stronger than it is to the state of Texas, but we aren’t meant to linger on it. When asked to make an oath to the Texas Rangers, he replies: “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.” The Civil War scarcely comes up again.
The Texas Ranger is a key figure in the universe of the Western, even if Ranger characters have fraught relationships to their jobs, and the Ranger’s proliferation as an icon serves the dominant Texas myth. More than 300 movies and television series have featured a Texas Ranger. Before Chuck Norris’ role in the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001), the most famous on-screen Ranger was the titular character of The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). Tonto, his Potawatomi sidekick, helps the Lone Ranger fight crime in early settled Texas. 
Meanwhile, the Ranger’s job throughout Texas history has included acting as a slave catcher and executioner of Native Americans. The group’s reign of terror lasted well into the 20th century in Mexican American communities, with Rangers committing a number of lynchings and helping to dispossess Mexican landowners. Yet period dramas like The Highwaymen (2019), about the Texas Rangers who stopped Bonnie and Clyde, and this year’s ill-advised reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger on the CW continue to valorize the renowned law enforcement agency. There is no neo-Western that casts the Texas Ranger in a role that more closely resembles the organization’s true history: as a villain.
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The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) ushered in the era of neo-Westerns set in modern times.
Ushered in by No Country for Old Men (2007), also set in Texas, the era of neo-Westerns has delivered films that take place in a modern, overdeveloped, contested West. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s projects attempt to address racialized issues around land and violence, but they sometimes fall into the same traps as older, revisionist Westerns—the non-white characters he seeks to uplift remain on the films’ peripheries. In Wind River (2017), the case of a young Indigenous woman who is raped and murdered is solved valiantly by action star Jeremy Renner and a young, white FBI agent played by Elizabeth Olsen. Sheridan’s attempt to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women still renders Indigenous women almost entirely invisible behind the images of white saviors.
There are directors who are challenging the white male gaze of the West, such as Chloé Zhao, whose recent film Nomadland dominated the 2021 Academy Award nominations. In 2017, Zhao’s film The Rider centered on a Lakota cowboy, a work nested in a larger cultural movement in the late 2010s that highlighted the untold histories of Native cowboys, Black cowboys, and vaqueros, historically Mexican cowboys whose ranching practices are the foundation of the U.S. cowboy tradition. And Concrete Cowboy, directed by Ricky Staub and released on Netflix in April, depicts a Black urban horse riding club in Philadelphia. In taking back the mythology of the cowboy, a Texas centerpiece and symbol, perhaps a new subgenre of the Western is forming.
Despite new iterations, the Western has not been transformed. Still a profoundly patriotic genre, the Western is most often remembered for its classics, which helped fortify the historical narrative that regeneration through violence was necessary for the forging of a nation. In Texas, the claim made by Mrs. Jorgensen in The Searchers remains a deeply internalized one: The history of Texas is that of a land infused with danger, a land that required brave defenders, and a land whose future demanded death to prosper. 
In Westerns set in the present day, it feels as if the Wild West has been settled but not tamed. Americans still haven’t learned how to live peacefully on the land, respect Indigenous people, or altogether break out of destructive patterns of domination. The genre isn’t where most people look for depictions of liberation and inclusion in Texas. Still, like Texas, the Western is a contested terrain with an unclear future. John Wayne’s old-fashioned values are just one way to be; the Western is just one way of telling our story.   
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boplauren · 6 years
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have yall ever noticed that it seems like almost all police brutality cases involve male cops.. like putting together toxic masculinity with power is dangerous and always has negative outcomes that comes in the form of violence.. not to sound like a crazy feminist bitch but either we replace the police force with all women or socially educated men
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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 8
At Evergreen State College, a group of genderfluid vigilantes (it’s fucking hilarious, here’s a photo of them) have taken to patrolling the grounds armed with bats and batons. Vice President for Student Affairs Wendy Endress sent a memo to students, pleading for the “community patrol” to lay down its weapons. The latest developments at the school come after students screamed at and threatened a white professor for not leaving campus on their anti-white day. Shortly after that, the professor, Bret Weinstein, was forced to flee campus and hold his class in a local park after police told him it’s not safe for him to be on campus. More recently some faculty have demanded Weinstein be punished for allegedly provoking a “white supremacist backlash” against the school. There’s now a video showing this same genderfluid vigilante students holding administrators hostage, blocking all exits including windows until demands were met which included the suspension without pay of Bret Weinstein and for Evergreen State to provide more support for illegal immigrants. In true hostage-style, the students even escorted an administrator when he complained he required the bathroom. 
The University of California, Riverside may soon become one of the first universities in the country to implement a mandatory gender studies program on campus which would require all students to complete a gender studies course in order to graduate, replacing an existing humanities requirement. The proposal was endorsed by the student government but must be approved by the faculty-run Academic Senate in order to take effect. If the idea is approved, UCR will become the third school in the country to impose a gender studies requirement, and the first in California. Summer Shafer, the student senator behind the proposal, assured students will retain a degree of choice when it comes to their required classes, and will be able to select from a pool of more than 300 gender courses that range from “masculinity studies to Beyonce.”
An online petition is demanding that Louisiana State University change its “Tigers” mascot, calling the mascot “the most prevalent Confederate symbol in the United States.” According to the author of the petition, the nickname was chosen by “powerful white males” as an homage to the Confederate “Louisiana Tigers” regiment, whose members “were known for their propensity for violence on and off the battle field. It is incredibly insulting for any African American to have to attend to a school that honors Confederate militantism. It is already hard enough to be black at LSU, and this symbol must be changed. We must speak truth to power, and continue to march toward justice. That day is coming, the day when every symbol of white oppression is torn down.” Almost as an afterthought, the author adds that “it’s also cruel to cage a wild animal for the amusement of privileged white people” who have “never been in a cage!”
DePaul University prevented much of the access to a campus event last Thursday evening which was meant to highlight gender inequality atrocities committed against women in Muslim-majority societies. Highlighted was a documentary of first-hand interviews with Muslim women who battle for the right to an education, religious freedom, and to be freed from practices such as forced marriages and female genital mutilation. DePaul made clear that the hosting student group could only screen the documentary with speakers if they restricted attendance to only its own student members, an order that would stop them from advertising it on campus and stop it from being open to other students or the public. 
The American Association of University Women have created a new guide to help its members practice "intersectional feminism." Claiming that the feminist movement needs "more non-white leaders," the post instructs white feminists to "confront your privilege" by recognizing other "forms of discrimination that are upheld by the patriarchy." AAUW intern Theresa Hice Johnson explains, “As women, we are oppressed by the patriarchal societal culture, but there is still a difference in how and to what extent we experience oppression based on our race, ethnicity, ability, appearance, culture, gender expression and more. The feminist movement needs to incorporate more non-white leaders in order to succeed.” I made a post on my blog last year that feminists would start to turn on each other and it will become a racial group instead of a women’s group. Just with all social justice groups, they are ruled by the oppression rankings and white females rank quite low so it was only a matter of time before they became targeted along with white males. It’s finally happening, “White Feminism” is their newest enemy.  
Students are demanding that the University of California-Davis create an “Environmental Justice” degree program because existing environmental studies courses are not focused on “social justice.” The students complain that the Environmental Science & Policy department is currently too "white-dominated," and that courses focus too heavily on environmental issues affecting "privileged communities." According to the student group, UC-Davis was founded on “a violent act of environmental injustice” because it sits on land that was “stolen” from indigenous peoples” and “the faculty is white-dominated and consists of little to no diversity" which is “a major factor contributing to the continuation of systematic environmental injustices being reaped most heavily by marginalized and oppressed groups making this an issue of social justice and a violation of human rights.”
Indiana University’s student government is urging students to take short, cold showers to prevent climate change and save the planet. “Maybe some people are deterred by that, but as time progresses these issues are going to become much more pressing and much more internationally important,” says the head of the student association’s newly founded sustainability department. Believe it or not, Indiana University isn’t alone; across the U.S, students are adopting this bizarre environmental measure. At Dickson College, one campus residence allots just three minutes of warm shower water a day for students. One sophomore living there recently gushed that she “couldn’t be more excited for cold showers.” At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the college urges students to “take colder showers” and also to “wear layers rather than turning on the heat” on winter days. At UC Irvine, a recent graduate said she was inspired to say goodbye to hot showers and at Ohio State University, one student shared her epiphany, “It’s disappointing because if I were to have been doing this my whole life, just taking one cold shower a week, I could have saved so much water and energy.” It’s easy to forget these people are adults. 
An Iowa community college has been accused of cultural appropriation after hearing instructors taught sign language classes. Scott Community College offers a two-year program that teaches students American Sign Language and equips them to work as professional interpreters. The President of the Quad-Cities Deaf Club was not a happy camper when he discovered that the students were being taught sign language by someone who could hear. In an op-ed slamming the college’s program. “It is cultural appropriation to use the language of the deaf community to make money for your institution without including deaf people in the instruction and provision of those classes. When hearing people are chosen to teach ASL, it is a form of ableism and audism.”
At Gonzaga University, one single student complained on Twitter that a children’s T-shirt sold in a campus shop “perpetuates rape culture,” and within less than an hour, the university responded, removing the T-shirt from its shelves and deciding to no longer sell it. The T-shirt showed Gonzaga’s mascot, Spike the Bulldog, along with the words, “Boys Will Be Boys.” After the initial Tweet, a second student also took umbrage with the T-shirt, writing, “yeah get this toxic masculinity out of here we have enough on campus already.” Mary Joan Hahn, a spokesperson for the university said, “When sensitivities are expressed, we take those concerns seriously. We want our apparel to reflect that.” 
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endlessinterior · 7 years
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The Ideology of Isolation By Rebecca Solnit
If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.
This is the modern ideology we still call conservative, though it is really a sort of loopy libertarianism that inverts some of the milder propositions of earlier conservative thinkers. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in 1987. The rest of her famous remark is less frequently quoted:
There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.
Throughout that interview with Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher walked the line between old-school conservatism — we are all connected in a delicate tapestry that too much government meddling might tear — and the newer version: “Too many children and people have been given to understand, ‘I have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’ ” At some point in the decades since, the balance tipped definitively from “government aid should not replace social connections” to “to hell with others and their problems.” Or as the cowboy sings to the calf, “It’s your misfortune / And none of my own.”
The cowboy is the American embodiment of this ideology of isolation, though the archetype of the self-reliant individual — like the contemporary right-wing obsession with guns — has its roots less in actual American history than in the imagined history of Cold War–era westerns. The American West was indigenous land given to settlers by the U.S. government and cleared for them by the U.S. Army, crisscrossed by government-subsidized railroads and full of water projects and other enormous cooperative enterprises. All this has very little to do with Shane and the sheriff in High Noon and the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western trilogy. But never mind that, because a cowboy silhouetted against a sunset looks so good, whether he’s Ronald Reagan or the Marlboro Man. The loner taketh not, nor does he give; he scorneth the social and relies on himself alone.
Himself. Women, in this mode of thinking, are too interactive, in their tendency to gather and ally rather than fight or flee, and in their fluid boundaries. In fact, what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform — the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular and sexuality in general — is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s first public questions after a decade of silence during oral arguments at the Supreme Court came this February, when he took an intense interest in whether barring those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from owning guns violated their constitutional rights. That there is a constitutional right for individuals to own guns is a gift of Antonin Scalia’s radically revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment, and it’s propped up on the cowboy ethos in which guns are incredibly useful for defending oneself from bad guys, and one’s right to send out bullets trumps the right of others not to receive them. Pesky facts demonstrate that very few people in this country successfully use guns to defend themselves from bad people — unless you count the nearly two thirds of American gun deaths that are suicides as a sad and peculiar form of self-defense. The ideologues of isolation aren’t interested in those facts, or in the fact that the majority of women murdered by intimate partners in the United States are killed with guns.
But I was talking about cowboys. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins describes how westerns valued deeds over words, a tight-lipped version of masculinity over communicative femininity, and concludes:
Not speaking demonstrates control not only over feelings but over one’s physical boundaries as well. The male . . . maintains the integrity of the boundary that divides him from the world. (It is fitting that in the Western the ultimate loss of that control takes place when one man puts holes in another man’s body.)
Fear of penetration and the fantasy of impenetrable isolation are central to both homophobia and the xenophobic mania for “sealing the border.” In other words, isolation is good, freedom is disconnection, and good fences, especially on the U.S.–Mexico border, make good neighbors.
Both Mitt Romney and Donald Trump have marketed themselves as self-made men, as lone cowboys out on the prairie of the free market, though both were born rich. Romney, in a clandestinely videotaped talk to his wealthy donors in 2012, disparaged people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
Taxes represent connection: what we each give to the collective good. This particular form of shared interest has been framed as a form of oppression for more than three decades, at least since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, bemoaned a “tax system which penalizes successful achievement.”
The spread of this right-wing hatred of taxes has been helped along by the pretense that taxes go to loafers and welfare queens who offend the conservative idea of independence, rather than to things conservatives like (notably, a military that dwarfs all others) or systems that everyone needs (notably, roads and bridges).
I ran into this hatred for dependency in an online discussion of the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco in April. More than a hundred messages into a fairly civil discourse started by a witness to the shooting, a commenter erupted,
I’m sick of people like you that think homeless people who can’t take care of themselves and their families have left them for us taxpaying citizens to care for think they have freedom. Once you can’t take care of or support yourself, and expect others to carry your burden, you have lost freedom. Wake up.
The same commenter later elaborated, “Have you ever owed money? Freedom lost. You owe someone. It’s called personal responsibility.”
Everyone on that neighborhood forum, including the writer, likely owed rent to a landlord or mortgage payments to a bank, making them more indebted than the homeless in their tents. If you’re housed in any American city, you also benefit from a host of services, such as water and sanitation and the organizations overseeing them, as well as from traffic lights and transit rules and building codes — the kind of stuff taxes pay for. But if you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone.
All this would have made that commenter’s tirade incoherent, if its points weren’t so familiar. This is the rhetoric of modern conservatives: freedom is a luxury that wealth affords you; wealth comes from work; those who don’t work, never mind the cause, are undeserving. If freedom and independence are the ideal, dependence is not merely disdained; it’s furiously loathed. In her novelistic paean to free enterprise Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand called dependents parasites and looters. “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency,” said one of Rand’s admirers, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the man lately charged with saving the soul of conservatism from Trumpist apostasy.
The modern right may wish that every man were an island, entire of himself, but no one is wholly independent. You can’t survive without taking air into your lungs, you didn’t give birth to or raise yourself, you won’t bury yourself, and in between you won’t produce most of the goods and services you depend on to live. Your gut is full of microorganisms, without which you could not digest all the plants and animals, likely grown by other people, on which you rely to survive. We are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.
There is, of course, such a thing as society, and you’re inside it. Beyond that, beneath it and above and around and within it and us, there is such a thing as ecology, the systems within which our social systems exist, and with which it often clashes.
Ecological thinking articulates the interdependence and interconnectedness of all things. This can be a beautiful dream of symbiosis when you’re talking about how, say, a particular species of yucca depends on a particular moth to pollinate it, and how the larvae of that moth depend on the seeds of that yucca for their first meals. Or it can be a nightmare when it comes to how toxic polychlorinated biphenyls found their way to the Arctic, where they concentrated in human breast milk and in top-of-the-food-chain carnivores such as polar bears. John Muir, wandering in the Yosemite in 1869, put it this way: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
This traditional worldview — for a long time, it was called conservative, and stood in contrast to liberal individualism — could be seen as mystical or spiritual, but the accuracy of its description of natural systems within what we now call the biosphere is borne out by modern science. If you kill off the wolves in Yellowstone, elk populations will explode and many other plant and animal species will suffer; if you spray DDT on crops, then the stuff does the job you intended of killing off pests, but it will also, as Rachel Carson told us in 1962, kill the birds who would otherwise keep many insects and rodents in check.
All this causes great trouble for the ideology of isolation. It interferes with the right to maximum individual freedom, a freedom not to be bothered by others’ needs. Which is why modern conservatives so insistently deny the realities of ecological interconnectedness, refusing to recognize that when you add something to or remove an element from an environment, you alter the whole in ways that may come back to bite you. The usual argument in defense of this pesticide or that oil platform is that impact does not spread, that the item in question does not become part of a far-reaching system, and sometimes — often, nowadays — that that far-reaching system does not itself exist.
No problem more clearly demonstrates the folly of individualist thinking — or more clearly calls for a systematic response — than climate change. The ideologues of isolation are doubly challenged by this fact. They reject the proposed solutions to climate change, because they bristle at the need for limits on production and consumption, for regulation, for cooperation between industry and government, and for international partnership. In 2011, Naomi Klein attended a meeting at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank, and produced a landmark essay about why conservatives are so furiously opposed to doing anything about climate change. She quotes a man from the Competitive Enterprise Institute who declared, “No free society would do to itself what this agenda requires. . . . The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.” “Most of all, however,” she reported, “I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.”
On a more fundamental level, the very idea of climate change is offensive to isolationists, because it tells us more powerfully and urgently than anything ever has that everything is connected, that nothing exists in isolation. What comes out of your tailpipe or your smokestack or your leaky fracking site contributes to the changing mix of the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cause the earth to retain more of the heat that comes from the sun, which doesn’t just result in what we used to call global warming, but will lead to climate chaos.
As the fact of climate change has become more and more difficult to deny, the ideologues of isolation deny instead our responsibility for the problem and the possibility that we are capable of acting collectively to do anything about it. “Climate change occurs no matter what,” Paul Ryan said a few years ago. “The question is, can and should the federal government do something about it? And I would argue the federal government, with all its tax and regulatory schemes, can’t.” Of course it can, but he prefers that it not do so, which is why he denies human impact as a cause and human solutions as a treatment.
What keeps the ideology of isolation going is going to extremes. If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end in denying the reality of facts, which are after all part of a network of systematic relationships between language, physical reality, and the record, regulated by the rules of evidence, truth, grammar, word meaning, and so forth. You deny the relationship between cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, or rather you imagine both as products on the free market, which one can produce and consume according to one’s preferences. You deregulate meaning.
Absolute freedom means you can have any truth that you like, and isolation’s ideologues like truths that keep free-market fundamentalism going. You can be like that unnamed senior adviser (probably Karl Rove), who in a mad moment of Bush-era triumphalism told Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Reality, in this worldview, is a product subject to market rules or military rules, and if you are dominant in the marketplace or rule the empire, your reality can push aside the other options. “Freedom” is just another word for nothing left to limit your options. And this is how the ideology of isolation becomes nihilism, trying to kill the planet and most living things on it with the confidence born of total disconnection.
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Being a Man in America: Sexism and Homophobia
https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=7361
For as long as America has been a country, men have been king of the hill.
However, many men have had difficulty adjusting to relatively recent societal shifts from the increasingly powerful role of women in the workplace to the acceptance of same-sex relationships. With globalization, automation, the decline of manufacturing, and the increasing disparity of wealth; there has been a growing number of obstacles around  what had historically allowed men to become dominant.
For a lot of men, being the breadwinner is the defining feature of masculinity. They staked their entire sense of manhood on their ability to be providers and protectors. In addition many working class men have had reduced access to more abstract forms of masculine validating power, like economic control or workplace authority. As a result, when changes arise, they feel humiliated. It’s not about being laughed at or embarrassed about being clumsy. It’s more profound. These men feel like they’ve failed at being men.
However, economic forces are only part of the paradigm shift currently occurring in our country regarding what it means to be masculine. The stereotypical male identity is built on a set of gender norms that endorses features such as toughness, dominance, self-reliance, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes or behaviors.
Recently, there has been a closer examination of how we define manliness in the era of MeToo, while adjusting to the living embodiment of toxic masculinity as president. When president Trump talks about making America great again, one of the things he is yearning for is the re-establishment of “traditional” gender roles. These involve establishing men as dominant and women as subservient, while encouraging that anyone who questions them is attacked. In this way, men are punished (often by other men) in a particularly gendered manner.  
For example, two five year old boys are on a playground. One five year old boy throws the ball and it doesn’t go very far. The other five year old boy yells, “Man you throw like a girl!” That is misogynistic because if being a girl weren’t bad it wouldn’t be an effective insult. 
The boy who was called a girl responds with, “Shut up you fag!” Now, it is likely that this five year old boy has no idea what that word means, let alone the history of hatred, violence, and aggression associated with it. However, he knows that when he feels emasculated by misogyny, that responding with homophobia is a way that he can try and prop up his masculinity. These degradations work to police the boundaries of what constitutes “strong and weak” for men. 
There are many men who have lived  their life as a tough guy. Tough guys appear strong, but their strength is a mask of overcompensation covering up feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Tough guys aren’t supposed to do a lot of things, like show fear or pain and offer compassion or vulnerability. Yet, men feel a full range of emotions, whether they are “supposed to” or not. 
Some men learned that expressing any emotion other than anger was a sign of weakness. Suppressing occurs when we hold our feelings inside for fear of expressing it. Some may have been told that emotions are a sign of weakness or anger makes you tough. Many learn to deny and avoid feelings so they will not be vulnerable to emotional pain anymore. However, internalizing emotions has a negative impact on men’s health. 
According to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health, men who suppress their emotions are 30% more likely to die prematurely than people who regularly express what they are feeling.  A study in the American Journal of Men’s Health found that men who repress their emotions have an increased risk of self-harming behaviors, depression, anxiety, and aggression. To this end, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the rate of suicide is 4 times higher in men than in women.
Perceived threats and unfavorable judgements around masculinity, fuel what author and speaker Tony Porter calls the “Man Box.” The “Man Box” describes the external expectations that society places on manhood such as:
Act tough
Act strong
Never show fear
Do not admit pain
Never show weakness
Do not ask for help
Do not express emotion — with the exception of anger.
Of course, the harm from the “Man Box” isn’t just limited to what these gender norms do to men.  It is also directly linked to gender-based violence.  When boys are pushed into the “Man Box,” women are seen as objects, property, and having less value. Sexism is a huge part of bonding among men who define themselves as heterosexual. The “locker room talk” that Donald Trump refers to, is not just banter, it’s an accepted, encouraged and repeated practice of objectifying and denigrating women.
In American society, violence against women is at epidemic proportions. We know that one in five women will be sexually assaulted during their first year of college. We know that every six seconds a woman is a victim of domestic violence. We know that one third of all women killed in this country are killed by men that lived in the home.
We need a system for repairing the pain that encourages men to be angry at the female gender. A man may have had one negative female in his life, but that can easily become generalized to the whole female population. As time goes by, he may come to think to himself “I am the victim of women, and I am entitled to get revenge, to victimize them as they victimized me. That’s fair.” He may lash out at any woman who is “weak” enough to love him. However, this mindset can be replaced with healthier, constructive feelings by accepting others help.
How then, do you get people to begin to change their thinking, change their behavior? Well, the first thing is to get people just to notice that, in fact, they make assumptions about other people.
Their conscious minds may not approve, but once they become tuned into these types of biases and are made aware of them, then they come to understand them as a problem to be addressed. One point to really recognize here is that having these biases doesn’t make people bad people. It makes them rather ordinary, having been socialized into a culture where these biases are embedded into the very fabric of our society. They’re picking up the messages. They’re not bad people. They’re ordinary. And that once men understand the problem that way, they can make a commitment to change, and they can start to think about the change process. If they are habits of mind, they can be broken like other habits can.
And there’s a number of interrelated factors that have to be set in place. People have to care. They have to be motivated. They have to want to do something. Without motivation, nothing will happen. They need to become tuned into, aware, and notice when they’re vulnerable to displaying biases. They have to have some tools and strategies to do something else, to disrupt that habitual way of thinking.
And then, like breaking any other habit, they are going to have to put effort into it over time. It’s not something that happens all at once. There’s not sort of a quick fix or a silver bullet, but we can empower people to make the change, and we can provide them with support to overcome these biases.
https://blogs.psychcentral.com/anger/files/2018/06/E3EBD33D-58FA-497E-886C-E7187E5EEB21-150x150.gif Credits: Original Content Source
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afrolatinxsunited · 3 years
Text
News and important updates on POS System Equipment & POS.
Scenes from The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne and set during the Texas-Indian Wars. The film is considered one of the most influential Westerns ever made.  
“It just so happens we be Texicans,” says Mrs. Jorgensen, an older woman wearing her blond hair in a tight bun, to rough-and-tumble cowboy Ethan Edwards in the 1956 film The Searchers. Mrs. Jorgensen, played by Olive Carey, and Edwards, played by John Wayne, sit on a porch facing the settling dusk sky, alone in a landscape that is empty as far as the eye can see: a sweeping desert vista painted with bright orange Technicolor. Set in 1868, the film lays out a particular telling of Texas history, one in which the land isn’t a fine or good place yet. But, with the help of white settlers willing to sacrifice everything, it’s a place where civilization will take root. Nearly 90 years after the events depicted in the film, audiences would come to theaters and celebrate those sacrifices. 
“A Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for 100 more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever,” Mrs. Jorgensen goes on. “Someday this country’s going to be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” 
There’s a subtext in these lines that destabilizes the Western’s moral center, a politeness deployed by Jorgensen that keeps her from naming what the main characters in the film see as their real enemies: Indians. 
In the film, the Comanche chief, Scar, has killed the Jorgensens’ son and Edwards’ family, and abducted his niece. Edwards and the rest of Company A of the Texas Rangers must find her. Their quest takes them across the most treacherous stretches of desert, a visually rich landscape that’s both glorious in its beauty and perilous given the presence of Comanche and other Indigenous people. In the world of the Western, brutality is banal, the dramatic landscape a backdrop for danger where innocent pioneers forge a civilization in the heart of darkness.
The themes of the Western are embodied by figures like Edwards: As a Texas Ranger, he represents the heroism of no-holds-barred policing that justifies conquest and colonization. While the real Texas Rangers’ history of extreme violence against communities of color is well-documented, in the film version, these frontier figures, like the Texas Rangers in The Searchers or in the long-running television show The Lone Ranger, have always been portrayed as sympathetic characters. Edwards is a cowboy with both a libertarian, “frontier justice” vigilante ethic and a badge that puts the law on his side, and stories in the Western are understood to be about the arc of justice: where the handsome, idealized male protagonist sets things right in a lawless, uncivilized land. 
The Western has long been built on myths that both obscure and promote a history of racism, imperialism, toxic masculinity, and violent colonialism. For Westerns set in Texas, histories of slavery and dispossession are even more deeply buried. Yet the genre endures. Through period dramas and contemporary neo-Westerns, Hollywood continues to churn out films about the West. Even with contemporary pressures, the Western refuses to transform from a medium tied to profoundly conservative, nation-building narratives to one that’s truly capable of centering those long victimized and villainized: Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and women characters. Rooted in a country of contested visions, and a deep-seated tradition of denial, no film genre remains as quintessentially American, and Texan, as the Western, and none is quite so difficult to change.
*
With origins in the dime and pulp novels of the late 19th century, the Western first took to the big screen in the silent film era. The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 short, was perhaps the genre’s first celluloid hit, but 1939’s Stagecoach, starring Wayne, ushered in a new era of critical attention, as well as huge commercial success. Chronicling the perilous journey of a group of strangers riding together through dangerous Apache territory in a horse-drawn carriage, Stagecoach is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential Westerns of all time. It propelled Wayne to stardom.
During the genre’s golden age of the 1950s, more Westerns were produced than films of any other genre. Later in the 1960s, the heroic cowboy character—like Edwards in The Searchers—grew more complex and morally ambiguous. Known as “revisionist Westerns,” the films of this era looked back at cinematic and character traditions with a more critical eye. For example, director Sam Peckinpah, known for The Wild Bunch (1969), interrogated corruption and violence in society, while subgenres like spaghetti Westerns, named because most were directed by Italians, eschewed classic conventions by playing up the dramatics through extra gunfighting and new musical styles and creating narratives outside of the historical context. Think Clint Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Tumblr media
The Great Train Robbery (1903), a short silent film, was perhaps the first iconic Western.
In the wake of the anti-war movement and the return of the last U.S. combat forces from Vietnam in 1973, Westerns began to decline, replaced by sci-fi action films like Star Wars (1977). But in the 1990s, they saw a bit of rebirth, with Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western epic Dances With Wolves (1990) and Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And today, directors like the Coen brothers (No Country for Old Men, True Grit) and Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario) are keeping the genre alive with neo-Westerns set in modern times.
Still, the Old West looms large, says cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin. Today’s Western filmmakers know they are part of a tradition and take the task seriously, even the irreverent ones like Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino called Django Unchained (2012) a spaghetti Western and, at the same time, “a Southern.” Tarantino knows that the genre, like much of American film, is about violence, and specifically racialized violence: The film, set in Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, flips the script by putting the gun in the hand of a freed slave. 
Slotkin has written a series of books that examine the myth of the frontier and says that stories set there are drawn from history, which gives them the authority of being history. “A myth is an imaginative way of playing with a problem and trying to figure out where you draw lines, and when it’s right to draw lines,” he says. But the way history is made into mythology is all about who’s telling the story. 
Slotkin’s work purports that the logic of westward expansion is, when boiled down to its basic components, “regeneration through violence.” Put simply: Kill or die. The very premise of the settling of the West is genocide. Settler colonialism functions this way; the elimination of Native people is its foundation. It’s impossible to talk about the history of the American West and of Texas without talking about violent displacement and expropriation. 
“The Western dug its own hole,” says Adam Piron, a film programmer at the Sundance Indigenous Institute and a member of the Kiowa and Mohawk tribes. In his view, the perspectives of Indigenous people will always be difficult to express through a form tied to the myth of the frontier. Indigenous filmmakers working in Hollywood who seek to dismantle these representations, Piron says, often end up “cleaning somebody else’s mess … And you spend a lot of time explaining yourself, justifying why you’re telling this story.”
While the Western presents a highly manufactured, racist, and imperialist version of U.S. history, in Texas, the myth of exceptionalism is particularly glorified, perpetuating the belief that Texas cowboys, settlers, and lawmen are more independent, macho, and free than anywhere else. Texas was an especially large slave state, yet African Americans almost never appear in Texas-based Westerns, a further denial of histories. In The Searchers, Edwards’ commitment to the white supremacist values of the South is even stronger than it is to the state of Texas, but we aren’t meant to linger on it. When asked to make an oath to the Texas Rangers, he replies: “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.” The Civil War scarcely comes up again.
The Texas Ranger is a key figure in the universe of the Western, even if Ranger characters have fraught relationships to their jobs, and the Ranger’s proliferation as an icon serves the dominant Texas myth. More than 300 movies and television series have featured a Texas Ranger. Before Chuck Norris’ role in the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001), the most famous on-screen Ranger was the titular character of The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). Tonto, his Potawatomi sidekick, helps the Lone Ranger fight crime in early settled Texas. 
Meanwhile, the Ranger’s job throughout Texas history has included acting as a slave catcher and executioner of Native Americans. The group’s reign of terror lasted well into the 20th century in Mexican American communities, with Rangers committing a number of lynchings and helping to dispossess Mexican landowners. Yet period dramas like The Highwaymen (2019), about the Texas Rangers who stopped Bonnie and Clyde, and this year’s ill-advised reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger on the CW continue to valorize the renowned law enforcement agency. There is no neo-Western that casts the Texas Ranger in a role that more closely resembles the organization’s true history: as a villain.
Tumblr media
The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) ushered in the era of neo-Westerns set in modern times.
Ushered in by No Country for Old Men (2007), also set in Texas, the era of neo-Westerns has delivered films that take place in a modern, overdeveloped, contested West. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s projects attempt to address racialized issues around land and violence, but they sometimes fall into the same traps as older, revisionist Westerns—the non-white characters he seeks to uplift remain on the films’ peripheries. In Wind River (2017), the case of a young Indigenous woman who is raped and murdered is solved valiantly by action star Jeremy Renner and a young, white FBI agent played by Elizabeth Olsen. Sheridan’s attempt to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women still renders Indigenous women almost entirely invisible behind the images of white saviors.
There are directors who are challenging the white male gaze of the West, such as Chloé Zhao, whose recent film Nomadland dominated the 2021 Academy Award nominations. In 2017, Zhao’s film The Rider centered on a Lakota cowboy, a work nested in a larger cultural movement in the late 2010s that highlighted the untold histories of Native cowboys, Black cowboys, and vaqueros, historically Mexican cowboys whose ranching practices are the foundation of the U.S. cowboy tradition. And Concrete Cowboy, directed by Ricky Staub and released on Netflix in April, depicts a Black urban horse riding club in Philadelphia. In taking back the mythology of the cowboy, a Texas centerpiece and symbol, perhaps a new subgenre of the Western is forming.
Despite new iterations, the Western has not been transformed. Still a profoundly patriotic genre, the Western is most often remembered for its classics, which helped fortify the historical narrative that regeneration through violence was necessary for the forging of a nation. In Texas, the claim made by Mrs. Jorgensen in The Searchers remains a deeply internalized one: The history of Texas is that of a land infused with danger, a land that required brave defenders, and a land whose future demanded death to prosper. 
In Westerns set in the present day, it feels as if the Wild West has been settled but not tamed. Americans still haven’t learned how to live peacefully on the land, respect Indigenous people, or altogether break out of destructive patterns of domination. The genre isn’t where most people look for depictions of liberation and inclusion in Texas. Still, like Texas, the Western is a contested terrain with an unclear future. John Wayne’s old-fashioned values are just one way to be; the Western is just one way of telling our story.   
This article was first provided on this site.
We hope you found the article above of help and/or of interest. Similar content can be found on our main site: southtxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback below in the comments section. Let us know what topics we should write about for you in the future.
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afriendlypokealien · 3 years
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News and important updates on POS System Equipment & POS.
Scenes from The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne and set during the Texas-Indian Wars. The film is considered one of the most influential Westerns ever made.  
“It just so happens we be Texicans,” says Mrs. Jorgensen, an older woman wearing her blond hair in a tight bun, to rough-and-tumble cowboy Ethan Edwards in the 1956 film The Searchers. Mrs. Jorgensen, played by Olive Carey, and Edwards, played by John Wayne, sit on a porch facing the settling dusk sky, alone in a landscape that is empty as far as the eye can see: a sweeping desert vista painted with bright orange Technicolor. Set in 1868, the film lays out a particular telling of Texas history, one in which the land isn’t a fine or good place yet. But, with the help of white settlers willing to sacrifice everything, it’s a place where civilization will take root. Nearly 90 years after the events depicted in the film, audiences would come to theaters and celebrate those sacrifices. 
“A Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for 100 more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever,” Mrs. Jorgensen goes on. “Someday this country’s going to be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” 
There’s a subtext in these lines that destabilizes the Western’s moral center, a politeness deployed by Jorgensen that keeps her from naming what the main characters in the film see as their real enemies: Indians. 
In the film, the Comanche chief, Scar, has killed the Jorgensens’ son and Edwards’ family, and abducted his niece. Edwards and the rest of Company A of the Texas Rangers must find her. Their quest takes them across the most treacherous stretches of desert, a visually rich landscape that’s both glorious in its beauty and perilous given the presence of Comanche and other Indigenous people. In the world of the Western, brutality is banal, the dramatic landscape a backdrop for danger where innocent pioneers forge a civilization in the heart of darkness.
The themes of the Western are embodied by figures like Edwards: As a Texas Ranger, he represents the heroism of no-holds-barred policing that justifies conquest and colonization. While the real Texas Rangers’ history of extreme violence against communities of color is well-documented, in the film version, these frontier figures, like the Texas Rangers in The Searchers or in the long-running television show The Lone Ranger, have always been portrayed as sympathetic characters. Edwards is a cowboy with both a libertarian, “frontier justice” vigilante ethic and a badge that puts the law on his side, and stories in the Western are understood to be about the arc of justice: where the handsome, idealized male protagonist sets things right in a lawless, uncivilized land. 
The Western has long been built on myths that both obscure and promote a history of racism, imperialism, toxic masculinity, and violent colonialism. For Westerns set in Texas, histories of slavery and dispossession are even more deeply buried. Yet the genre endures. Through period dramas and contemporary neo-Westerns, Hollywood continues to churn out films about the West. Even with contemporary pressures, the Western refuses to transform from a medium tied to profoundly conservative, nation-building narratives to one that’s truly capable of centering those long victimized and villainized: Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and women characters. Rooted in a country of contested visions, and a deep-seated tradition of denial, no film genre remains as quintessentially American, and Texan, as the Western, and none is quite so difficult to change.
*
With origins in the dime and pulp novels of the late 19th century, the Western first took to the big screen in the silent film era. The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 short, was perhaps the genre’s first celluloid hit, but 1939’s Stagecoach, starring Wayne, ushered in a new era of critical attention, as well as huge commercial success. Chronicling the perilous journey of a group of strangers riding together through dangerous Apache territory in a horse-drawn carriage, Stagecoach is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential Westerns of all time. It propelled Wayne to stardom.
During the genre’s golden age of the 1950s, more Westerns were produced than films of any other genre. Later in the 1960s, the heroic cowboy character—like Edwards in The Searchers—grew more complex and morally ambiguous. Known as “revisionist Westerns,” the films of this era looked back at cinematic and character traditions with a more critical eye. For example, director Sam Peckinpah, known for The Wild Bunch (1969), interrogated corruption and violence in society, while subgenres like spaghetti Westerns, named because most were directed by Italians, eschewed classic conventions by playing up the dramatics through extra gunfighting and new musical styles and creating narratives outside of the historical context. Think Clint Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Tumblr media
The Great Train Robbery (1903), a short silent film, was perhaps the first iconic Western.
In the wake of the anti-war movement and the return of the last U.S. combat forces from Vietnam in 1973, Westerns began to decline, replaced by sci-fi action films like Star Wars (1977). But in the 1990s, they saw a bit of rebirth, with Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western epic Dances With Wolves (1990) and Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And today, directors like the Coen brothers (No Country for Old Men, True Grit) and Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario) are keeping the genre alive with neo-Westerns set in modern times.
Still, the Old West looms large, says cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin. Today’s Western filmmakers know they are part of a tradition and take the task seriously, even the irreverent ones like Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino called Django Unchained (2012) a spaghetti Western and, at the same time, “a Southern.” Tarantino knows that the genre, like much of American film, is about violence, and specifically racialized violence: The film, set in Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, flips the script by putting the gun in the hand of a freed slave. 
Slotkin has written a series of books that examine the myth of the frontier and says that stories set there are drawn from history, which gives them the authority of being history. “A myth is an imaginative way of playing with a problem and trying to figure out where you draw lines, and when it’s right to draw lines,” he says. But the way history is made into mythology is all about who’s telling the story. 
Slotkin’s work purports that the logic of westward expansion is, when boiled down to its basic components, “regeneration through violence.” Put simply: Kill or die. The very premise of the settling of the West is genocide. Settler colonialism functions this way; the elimination of Native people is its foundation. It’s impossible to talk about the history of the American West and of Texas without talking about violent displacement and expropriation. 
“The Western dug its own hole,” says Adam Piron, a film programmer at the Sundance Indigenous Institute and a member of the Kiowa and Mohawk tribes. In his view, the perspectives of Indigenous people will always be difficult to express through a form tied to the myth of the frontier. Indigenous filmmakers working in Hollywood who seek to dismantle these representations, Piron says, often end up “cleaning somebody else’s mess … And you spend a lot of time explaining yourself, justifying why you’re telling this story.”
While the Western presents a highly manufactured, racist, and imperialist version of U.S. history, in Texas, the myth of exceptionalism is particularly glorified, perpetuating the belief that Texas cowboys, settlers, and lawmen are more independent, macho, and free than anywhere else. Texas was an especially large slave state, yet African Americans almost never appear in Texas-based Westerns, a further denial of histories. In The Searchers, Edwards’ commitment to the white supremacist values of the South is even stronger than it is to the state of Texas, but we aren’t meant to linger on it. When asked to make an oath to the Texas Rangers, he replies: “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.” The Civil War scarcely comes up again.
The Texas Ranger is a key figure in the universe of the Western, even if Ranger characters have fraught relationships to their jobs, and the Ranger’s proliferation as an icon serves the dominant Texas myth. More than 300 movies and television series have featured a Texas Ranger. Before Chuck Norris’ role in the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001), the most famous on-screen Ranger was the titular character of The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). Tonto, his Potawatomi sidekick, helps the Lone Ranger fight crime in early settled Texas. 
Meanwhile, the Ranger’s job throughout Texas history has included acting as a slave catcher and executioner of Native Americans. The group’s reign of terror lasted well into the 20th century in Mexican American communities, with Rangers committing a number of lynchings and helping to dispossess Mexican landowners. Yet period dramas like The Highwaymen (2019), about the Texas Rangers who stopped Bonnie and Clyde, and this year’s ill-advised reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger on the CW continue to valorize the renowned law enforcement agency. There is no neo-Western that casts the Texas Ranger in a role that more closely resembles the organization’s true history: as a villain.
Tumblr media
The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) ushered in the era of neo-Westerns set in modern times.
Ushered in by No Country for Old Men (2007), also set in Texas, the era of neo-Westerns has delivered films that take place in a modern, overdeveloped, contested West. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s projects attempt to address racialized issues around land and violence, but they sometimes fall into the same traps as older, revisionist Westerns—the non-white characters he seeks to uplift remain on the films’ peripheries. In Wind River (2017), the case of a young Indigenous woman who is raped and murdered is solved valiantly by action star Jeremy Renner and a young, white FBI agent played by Elizabeth Olsen. Sheridan’s attempt to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women still renders Indigenous women almost entirely invisible behind the images of white saviors.
There are directors who are challenging the white male gaze of the West, such as Chloé Zhao, whose recent film Nomadland dominated the 2021 Academy Award nominations. In 2017, Zhao’s film The Rider centered on a Lakota cowboy, a work nested in a larger cultural movement in the late 2010s that highlighted the untold histories of Native cowboys, Black cowboys, and vaqueros, historically Mexican cowboys whose ranching practices are the foundation of the U.S. cowboy tradition. And Concrete Cowboy, directed by Ricky Staub and released on Netflix in April, depicts a Black urban horse riding club in Philadelphia. In taking back the mythology of the cowboy, a Texas centerpiece and symbol, perhaps a new subgenre of the Western is forming.
Despite new iterations, the Western has not been transformed. Still a profoundly patriotic genre, the Western is most often remembered for its classics, which helped fortify the historical narrative that regeneration through violence was necessary for the forging of a nation. In Texas, the claim made by Mrs. Jorgensen in The Searchers remains a deeply internalized one: The history of Texas is that of a land infused with danger, a land that required brave defenders, and a land whose future demanded death to prosper. 
In Westerns set in the present day, it feels as if the Wild West has been settled but not tamed. Americans still haven’t learned how to live peacefully on the land, respect Indigenous people, or altogether break out of destructive patterns of domination. The genre isn’t where most people look for depictions of liberation and inclusion in Texas. Still, like Texas, the Western is a contested terrain with an unclear future. John Wayne’s old-fashioned values are just one way to be; the Western is just one way of telling our story.   
This article was first provided on this site.
We hope you found the article above of help and/or of interest. Similar content can be found on our main site: southtxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback below in the comments section. Let us know what topics we should write about for you in the future.
youtube
0 notes