Whatever Happened to White Guys: Part 3
Star Trek Episode ‘Day of the Dove,’ and How It Partly Explains American White-Guy Rage, with a Few Ways We Might Be Saved, One Solution Being, at First Blush, a Bit Unusual, But Certainly Effective
Consider this prose poem:
Guy Talk
My son asks, “What does it mean when you’re watching TV and your dick gets hard?” “Change the channel,” I say, “and when you speak to me, call your dick a penis.” Though I never did. We had more names for our penises than the Greeks had for gods: pecker, dink, swanzola…. You’ve heard them, seen the boys laughing behind the sand dunes lost in their fathers’ dirty magazines. What fascination! How they simultaneously run and grip themselves while filling the air with soccer balls. How, as adults, these same boys display and measure their members on a specially designed cutting board, so that afterwards, a pecker order decided, they can speak honestly with each other. If just for a moment.
The above piece pokes fun of the male fascination with a certain body part, while also offering a takedown of the negative side of unbridled competitiveness that keeps men from becoming close and able to speak honestly with each other. Keep it in mind as you read on.
It is hard to pick out my favorite Star Trek episode, but “Day of the Dove” certainly ranks high on my list. To me, it is a profound moral parable that syncs nicely with my ideas on the current white-guy Trumpian rage. If I listed every demeaning nonpolitical comment Trump has ever made (and it would take me a few months or more), it would be impossible for any decent man, in spite of his political beliefs, to support Trump’s agenda. You can like a politician’s policies without wanting him to represent you. Some of his supporters say, “But he’s funny.” Not true, John Mulaney is funny. Chris Rock is funny. George Lopez is funny. But the menacing laughter you hear at a Trump rally is reminiscent of the chuckles and knee-slapping hee-haws weak-willed middle graders display after the class bully trips the class geek as he’s walking to his desk, or throws a two-handed basketball pass into that geek’s face during gym class.
But, for now, let’s return to the “Day of the Dove.”
This Star Trek episode begins with the Enterprise responding to a distress call from a human colony on a distant planet. When the crew beams down, they discover a seemingly uninhabited landscape until, almost immediately, they are surrounded by Klingons led by Captain Kirk’s arch enemy, Kang. Conflict of course ensues, with Chekov accusing the Klingons of killing his brother. Eventually, both the Klingons and the Enterprise crew end up on the Enterprise. Unknown to both parties, an entity composed of pure negative energy has also come aboard and has interfaced with the ship’s controls.
What follows is very interesting. The entity traps most of the Enterprise in the bowels of the ship, but leaves 38 Enterprise members above, which is equal to the number of Klingons who have been beamed up. And, thus, the fighting begins in earnest with swords and other ancient weapons the entity provides, so that the person-to-person battles are quite bloody.
Fortunately, Spock discovers the existence of this entity while at the same time Dr. McCoy tells Captain Kirk that his injured crewmen are healing at an incredible rate. It seems that the entity wants to keep both crews well-armed, healthy, and fighting for eternity. Indeed, this entity nurtures and feeds on rage. Without it, its very existence is in jeopardy.
Fortunately, Captain Kirk, instead of being consumed by anger, comes upon a solution. Relying on his wits and moral compass, he convinces Kang to believe in the existence of this entity. Kirk further gets Kang to stop fighting and instead defeats the entity by starving it of its main sustenance: rage. Both crews begin to make jokes and laugh, and as this merriment escalates, the entity, sickened by such joyful comradery, takes its private horror show elsewhere.
I hope you can see where I am going with this.
Donald Trump is indeed like this entity. He nurtures and feeds off the white male anger and grievance that I have been discussing in the previous two essays.
In one sense, Trumps message of rage and grievance is appealing because of its simplicity. Indeed, if every time at a rally Trump said something horrible (like making fun of a disabled person, or demonizing an old man who has been beaten in his house with a hammer), people would begin to boo and drift away, Trump, like that Entity in Star Trek, would shrink or turn into vapor and disappear into his hate-filled evening. But there is an attraction to his simplistic message—that is, that all of our social, political, or religious problems will go away if we shut down our borders, make it so people of color stay trapped socially and economically in their own neighborhoods, or force everyone to believe in the same God, who is white, drives a Mercedes, and has the biggest 401k in the celestial universe..
What Trump and of of his insecure adolescent male followers inexplicably overlook is the obvious: life is messy.
During the midterms, Obama, with his usual wit, pointed out the failure of simplistic thinking. He spoke about how Republicans have one answer to every problem: “Cut the taxes of the rich.” Then he recalled how he was a lousy math student in grammar school, and how he thought, with the naïve mind of a middle-schooler, math would be much simpler if he could write down the number eight as an answer to every problem. Easy, yes, he said, except that it would almost always be “the wrong answer.” Similarly, closing down the border is not the right answer. But completely opening it up isn’t either. It’s a “messy” question and many factors have to be weighed. But since this takes time, it’s easier to call all Mexican men rapists and send the National Guard there to shoot them in the legs when they try to cross the border. Even I was shocked by how many white guys I knew thought that latter horrific solution was funny.
In short, “real” solutions come from weighing information, seeing contingencies and making concessions. Although it’s not cool to make generalities about gender, over the years, I have come to believe that women, most of whom aren’t driven by power and rage, often are better at recognizing and dealing with complexities. Certainly, there are a lot of women who are jerks, but, as sociologist Carol Gilligan pointed out years ago in A Different Voice, “women speak in a voice not of competition but of cooperation.” She further argued that their “moral reasoning” is dictated by an allegiance to the balance between caring for oneself and caring for others.
We sorely need this humanistic approach now. The Trump Problem isn’t about politics. It’s about decency, and I don’t know many women who would let their children behave like Donald Trump. My hope is that, at this crucial moment, women will fill the void white guys have created. Not all white guys, of course, but there are enough of them who have gone AWOL.
And if women do, indeed, step up, and if in spite of their decency and courage, white guys (and, I guess, all men in general) decide to turn a deaf ear to their “different voices,” allow me to remind you of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, written by Aristophanes, where Lysistrata convinces her fellow Athenian women to end the Peloponnesian War by refusing to have sex with their husbands.
A preposterous solution, you might say, especially in our woke 21st Century. But is it really? When one of her friends asks Lysistrata if her plan will work, she simply replies: "Absolutely … If we sat around at home all made up, and walked past them wearing only our diaphanous underwear, with our pubes all plucked in a neat triangle, and our husbands got hard and hankered to ball us, but we didn't go near them and kept away, they'd sue for peace, and pretty quick, you can count on that!"
I’d like to think we men are more evolved than Lysistrata suggests, but all I have to do is to look into the mirror to know otherwise.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments even though he has a publisher for it by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss