Where Are the Men?

Little sleep last night, Bush. I’m in the grip of anxieties about a number of things, including the sale of our old house and the responsibilities of the new one; and, not least, the prospect of having to travel up north in a couple of weeks to give the keynote address to a gathering of elder men in the ManKind Project. The theme for the weekend is “Where Are the Men?” and I’m stuck on the bit about men being responsible for all the damage in the world today.

Take your good self, Bush, and the men you’ve surrounded yourself with. Your Cheney. Your Rumsfeld. Your Gonzales… Even your women seem powered by the male gene: your Rice, your Karen Hughes… My judgment is that you’re all drunk and blinded with power, that the version of masculine energy you represent and project is destructive rather than creative, that it emanates from a false and misguided sense of strength which is in truth no more than a terror of seeming weak. It’s a posturing, a strutting, an imposition of the will, a mistrust of the uncertainty that is at the very heart of life, an assertion of principle at the expense of tolerance and doubt.

Take the men of the church. Take the new Pope, or the imams of the Middle East, or those evangelical preachers who wield so much influence in America today. Men who seem inspired by the desperate need to protect their power base at all costs, to protect the institutions that give them their justification. Men who are at infinite pains to exclude women from their ministry, whose institutions are riddled with the hatred and mistrust of the feminine energy. Men who will readily abuse their power in order to protect it.

Or look at the tyrants of the world. How many of them, Bush, have been women? Take a look at the Idi Amins, the Saddam Husseins, the Hitlers, the Stalins… the list is endless. In their insatiable addiction to power and dominance, they kill hundreds of thousands, they kill millions of their fellow human beings. Or take the most notorious of criminals, the Al Capones, the Charles Mansons… The murderers, the rapists. The sad truth is that the vast majority of these people are men.

Or look at the warriors, Bush. The generals and the soldiers. Look at today’s corporate chiefs, with their gargantuan salaries and their obscene perks. Look at the political leaders—the Bill Frists, the Delays... How ready they are to cheat and prevaricate. Look even at the sports world, with its money, its commercialism, its drugs. So much of our tired old world is dominated by driving competition and greed, by the need to defeat and acquire, the need to prove power and dominance. It’s a disheartening spectacle of male energy gone awry, Bush, and it derives in good part, I believe, from the ancient days of humanity, when these qualities were developed in the male psyche for then the most compelling of reasons: survival. But these same qualities in today’s world keep leading us blindly in the opposite direction: toward the destruction of our species.

So what are we to do with that good, powerful male energy today, and where are the men who are willing to explore the alternatives? Where are the peaceful, spiritual warriors who can turn the assests of their physical strength, their competitiveness, their daring, their need for adventure, their protectiveness into creative and positive paths. I think of the scientists and researchers hunting down the causes and exploring the prevention of disease, the “doctors without borders” who risk their very lives to save those of others, of those working to redeem the poverty-stricken, the addicted, the criminal. I think of those who dedicate their lives to envisioning a better world, new paradigms for our institutions and practices, and of those who retreat into silence and contemplation, whose work is to create the spiritual space for the changes we must make if we wish to survive. I think of men of compassion, who understand that to deny the feminine principle, and the feminine part of themselves is to disempower one half of the human resources of the planet.

So what’s it to be, Bush? I can’t predict the future, but I see only two ways to go with our masculine power: destruction or regeneration. Although maybe—a dreadful prospect—we will be called on to experience the one before we can hope to reach the other. Tell me, what do you think?