Mueller is Not a Style Icon: he is just a professional adult

In Washington’s current climate of crassness, exaggeration, and accusations, the public are not well served when the press print things that are salacious, silly, or just plain wrong. So as a public service I must say, that no-

Robert Mueller is not a style icon.What a shame that the New Yorker has fallen so far that the editorial board knew no better than to accept the author’s proposal that because the man wears suits that fit, he is somehow doing fashion.

I of course wear ill fitting suits, not because I am anti- fashion, but rather because I am anti sit-ups and there are consequences for such decisions. Somehow we have confused the sort of discipline that includes reasonable portion size as well as reasonable amounts of pomade with style. That isn’t style, that is a healthy morning ritual.

Occasionally in the mornings I trim my nose hairs. This is not some sort of extreme preening worthy of note by the national press, this is simply because I am a grown man with a job who doesn’t want those he interacts with to be distracted by a disgusting nose jungle. Mr. Mueller’s attire might indeed be like my nose, intentionally boring, or it may be naturally boring (like the lucky noses), but either way it is a far stretch from any sort of rhinoplasty.

So stop it Mr. Patterson. Do not tell America that by wearing a pin striped suit with a button-down collared white shirt, that Mr. Mueller is doing anything other than just being boring- and a little bit wrong.

What we really need to discuss is why a man with such an important job is wearing the exact watch I was disappointed to have in 4th grade. I wanted the calculator watch thinking it would help me get an A on my math test. If that investigation is leaking why isn’t anyone looking into that watch because even Mr. Checketts at Bell View Elementary knew better than to start a test without checking our wrists and no one who cares a thing about style is wearing a Casio DW-290.

 

(Yeah, so maybe this is like a year late- just like the impending indictments)

What It Takes To Get What I Want

Over the years and through a lot of experience I have learned a few useful things. One of the most useful, or the most widely applicable, is that in order to get what I want, I have to go and get it. Not in the simple work hard toward a goal sort of thing, but much more in a stop sitting there with your hand raised waiting to be called or chosen, because you will never get picked. So instead stand up and go grab, or do, whatever you want. Don’t wait for permission, don’t wait your turn, just do it. Because my turn never came up.

I know now that one of the major reasons I never got my turn, at least not in the way I always dreamed, is because no matter what I knew, or could do, no one knew who I was. Nor did they really care who I was- or am. I realize now that my ability to do anything- absolutely anything- has always been limited by the people around me. I have never met an astronaut, and as it turns out, it is very hard to become an astronaut if you do not, nor does anyone around you know, an astronaut- or at least someone working on the human side of the space program. Now I recall being told lots of prerequisites, or told of the appropriate path to one day being eligible for being launched into space, but I know now that they were in reality just guessing, or passing along the guesses, of others. They didn’t really know and I was absolutely never going to be an astronaut.

And yet someone out there still gets to be an astronaut.

What I was and have always been most likely to become, was a school teacher. There was by proximity always the chance I could be a police officer, a CPA, or a low level manager in any variety of businesses where I would be tasked with numerous duties that would be hard to explain to a suburban adolescent and even more impossible to make interesting to such a person. Because growing up, those were the people surrounding me, and the people I knew.

I guess there was a chance, thanks to the unique characteristics of my school teacher father, that I might have become a hermit living in the woods, an auto mechanic, or maybe even a cowboy, but I had no true interest in those things. I was sort of interested in art. I was pretty good at drawing, and though my father was in fact an art teacher, I knew no working artists- other than teachers. I had other interests as well, but my experience, environment, and the advice coming from those I knew, told me that none of the things I was interested in would ever feed a family, which was my primary duty, and were best given up or at least relegated to hobbies. This was practical advice, and from any of our experiences, it was true. So I settled.

Eventually I moved. And I started, intentionally, meeting new people. I wanted to do new things. I wanted to do things that were interesting and meaningful, or even just more in line with the things I was best at, and I started to just go for it. I did most all of this unsupervised and un mentored, which is to say I probably did most of it poorly. Yet some of it worked. For instance, it never occurred to me that I could attend an Ivy League school. Quite the opposite really. In fact, to my knowledge I never even met anyone who attended an Ivy League School till, as an adult, I moved to Philadelphia. Once there I met plenty of very impressive, yet still human, students and alumni from nearly all the Ivies. I met them because they lived there, and even then, it did not occur to me that I could attend till one day I did a strange thing and emailed a woman I heard on the radio. She was talking about things I found interesting, the same sorts of things I was doing as a hobby, and it just so happened that she was a professor at an Ivy League school. I reached out to her out of the clear blue sky, mostly because she was local, and surprisingly she reached back.

And now I have a degree from an Ivy League School. Had I just sat and waited for that school to notice me, or really, had I just sent in an application not knowing anyone, it never would have worked. Not for me.

As I look back at it now, most of the things I have done in my life of which I am proud, or that might be of some value (because those two are not exactly the same) are the result of me showing up somewhere uninvited, inviting myself, or reaching out to complete strangers. I have learned to put on a suit jacket, act like I belong, and then just stroll in and casually start asking questions. It works. Sometimes. Really it only works a very small portion of the time, but in the 40+ years of my life, it is the only thing that has ever worked. I am just not shiny enough, noticeable enough, or connected enough, to do any different- that is if I want to do anything remarkable.

And along the way, I have also learned and seen directly, that this works in large part …

 

because I am white.

 

I have learned that these things don’t work quite the same, if someone is black. Or a woman. Or anything that isn’t like me, a straight white man. This is not to say that it cannot work for a black man, but the stakes are definitely not the same. The worst that has happened to me is getting kicked out of the American Philosophical Society Archives and told to come back during a regularly scheduled meeting. No, that isn’t the worst. I have indeed been called lots of nasty names and insulted with words, but I am given a helping of grace or room for error, whereas a black man entering a room uninvited is very likely to be arrested- or worse.

Not figuratively. Not maybe. But Likely.

Like here

Or here

And here

How about here?

Should I keep going?

This is what has, and is, and really has always been, the case for black people. Not every time of course, just like walking in uninvited didn’t work for me every time. But the default setting is that though this world, this America, isn’t set up to hand me anything, it will allow me to do things that are just a little bit “out there” in order to get a shot, while this same world is suspect of, afraid of, and will normally squash, repel, or punish any black person who does something just a little bit “out there” trying to get a shot.

That is what privilege is.

And that is how America works.

The Attack on Manhood.

Do not confuse the righting of a sinking ship, or just a plain old sinking ship, with a war on men. Or a war on white people. Or Christians. While there are indeed acidic antagonists who hate all of those things (men, white people, and religion) we should not confuse current efforts, or movements toward equity as a war against {insert demographic here}.

The truth is that white Christian men currently, and have historically, wielded disproportionate power in America. This power has been gained and sustained by money, cultural norms, and quite often by violence.

For centuries white Christian men have been able to do as they (we) please, only having to consider anyone “other” than themselves as a consolation, or out of what they (we) have perceived as our magnanimous generosity. This is not to say that white Christian men have run amok completely unchecked, just ask anyone one of them as they (we) have felt continually put in check, but those external limits on our behavior and power have been put in place and enforced, primarily by other white Christian men. We have lived in a world so completely our own that we have grown accustomed to it like a fish grows accustomed to water, and by growing, I mean gestation, as we seem to feel it natural at birth.

Though unlike fish, we do not need this currently constructed environment to survive. But sometimes, or most times, we think we do.

As the world shrinks, access to information increases, and the true diversity of the world becomes so ever more apparent, and present, many people realize that white Christian men do not hold a monopoly on goodness and wisdom and “how it should be”, and in America, all of those “others”, those who aren’t white Christian men, those who have been here all along but have just never been the ones running the show, start asserting themselves- white Christian men start to freak out.

Let’s not freak out.

Let us be honest with ourselves in a way that goes beyond reactionary defensiveness and blind lashing out at those rallying for change. The truth is that there are ridiculously few of “them” out there who are opposed to, or truly against, who we are. No. That’s not quite right. I should be more precise here. There are plenty of people against who we are, but they aren’t necessarily against who we claim we are, or who we strive to be. There are plenty against a lot of the things we do or have done, which isn’t the same thing- unless we unnaturally peg our identity to those things. So, let’s take stock.

Is manhood based on the color blue or our selection of shoes? While I have no desire to wear high heels, I do not think my manhood, or my male-ness, is really attached to my wingtips. I know many men who wear long hair, some of them wear it from their chin, and while I have a slight understanding of facial hair being associated with androgens more prevalent in males, I have never believed that my beard makes me a man or that a pony tail is influenced in any way by my genitals. Now I know that there are those who disagree. There are many men who not only prefer, but believe, that men should not wear makeup or skirts. I get it. I don’t feel comfortable in those things either. I am also not aware of anyone who is trying to make me wear those things.

Neither am I aware of how someone else wearing those things changes my manhood. Nor do those things contradict my Christianity. Choice in clothing or grooming is not the same as choice in sexual activity- and absolutely no one is telling me I must have sex with someone other than whom I choose, so I fail to see the actual connection between gender norms and my religiously dictated sexual conduct. I am a heterosexual white Christian man and no one that I have met is asking me not to be these things. At least not in “real life”.

But there are changes, many of which are quite contentious. Let us take for example, the Boy Scouts of America.

What exactly is it in the Boy Scouts of America, that is truly gender based?

My mother is a better camper than most of the “manly” men I know. So was my grandmother. Sleeping in tents, tying knots, shooting arrows, or earning badges in a quasi-militaristic organization that casually imitates Native Americans without truly investigating their culture has very little to do with my genitalia, my sexual orientation, or even the qualities I believe make a good man. In fact, many, possibly even most, of the qualities that I would claim make a “good man” have nothing at all to do with anyone’s genitalia or sexual preferences. In other words, most of the things, at least in my mind, that make a good man are really just things that make a good person. Honesty, chastity, benevolence, moral steadfastness, kindness, service orientation, civic mindedness, leadership, preparedness and progression, pretty much everything built in to scouting to build good boys, are the same things I try to teach my daughters.

No one is fighting that.

But I do acknowledge that boys and girls are different. I acknowledge it enough, and here is me exposing my own needs or feelings, that I long for and appreciate male spaces in my life. Sometimes I like to hang out with other guys. I’m a cis gender heteronormative straight Christian white male and carry with me plenty of the social preferences that go along with those norms. Sometimes I wanna hang with the guys. I get it. That is me. And I am not being attacked.

What is under attack is the infrastructure that gives me, and those most strictly like me, disproportionate privileges.

The Boy Scouts have been in a long decline for a lot of reasons beyond American gender norms. While many of the principles of scouting are not, nor have ever been overtly race or class based, the delivery and socialization of scouting absolutely has (just like most things in America). Yes there is a push against gender exclusivity today, but we are also more urban, more international, more technological, less economically homogenous than in the past and more adults spend more time working, and children have more organized activities than existed when the Scouts were founded. All of those things have led to declining participation in the Boy Scouts.

There is at this same moment, as in all moment spast, a lack of true equity for girls. When it comes to what the Boy Scouts do (or have done), or the resources the Boy Scouts have on hand, there is no true female equivalent.

My daughter has no interest in selling cookies in front of Target (and I know the Girl Scouts do more than that) but she would probably love to get SCUBA certified at a huge discount like I did when I was a Boy Scout. But she doesn’t, nor do I as her parent, have access to that. In this case the only difference between the programs offered and the benefits involved, is that boys get to and girls do not. I am not opposed to boys SCUBA diving. Letting my daughter do the same would not constitute an attack and masculinity. Those two should not be confused. In addition, my church is one of, if not the, biggest supporters of the BSA and while I know my faith values my little girls, I also know that it does not offer anything for them that is quite as robust or well-funded (even with the current BSA decline).

Does this mean my girls should join the scouts? I don’t know. I don’t really have any interest in them doing so, but if someone else did, or does, that does not constitute an attack on me or who I am.

But it isn’t just the scouts, nor is it just my church, rather we are experiencing a broader nationwide shift in power. Or at least a shift in perception, as most of those who have historically held power still hold it, though I am not one of them, and many people who are the most like me- can feel it. But just like stepping on a nail with bare feet, we jerk our knees without having to think- because we feel it.

The only problem here is that we haven’t stepped on a nail but rather we have been shod in power our entire existence and suddenly now our boots are off and we are being made to feel the pricks and prods of those on whom we trod. We are not knee jerking at nails but rather reacting to women, black people, Hindus, non-English speakers, immigrants, and on, and on, and on. Our boots are off and our white Christian manly feet are tender. It is unfair that for centuries this country has been primarily, if not explicitly, just meant for me, and if I am in any way trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, or reverent, I will step up and adjust to what is right rather than kick barefoot against the pricks.

Because in the past, despite my lack of elite status or a well-stocked wallet, I have never had to struggle shoulder to shoulder with all those “others” but rather I have been wearing well insulated boots which allow me to stamp on top of all of “them” while competing against other white Christian men for my American dream.

Those boots are not “who I am” and being asked to take them off is not an attack. It is simply doing what’s right.