Prince Hal in Time Out, or Boys’ Education and the Bogus Crisis of Masculinity

A book you probably won't find on David Brooks' bookshelf

 I follow the journalism of my country of birth just closely enough to suspect that David Brooks is a rather significant part of what is wrong with it. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky once suggested that behind the great scandals that attract everyone’s outrage there are often bigger abuses that pass virtually undetected. Thus, Herman and Chomsky argue, when the Watergate scandal broke there was widespread outrage, but no one ever seemed to care that Nixon had infiltrated and harassed non-establishment political organisations for years beforehand. Likewise, the Neanderthal commentary on Fox News deservedly attracts derision from those of us who are pretty sure that Obama is not a Kenyan-born socialist and other members of the reality-based community, yet perhaps the bigger outrage is that the supposedly rational New York Times employs a commentator of such stark prejudices and feeble argumentative skills as David Brooks.

When Brooks isn't opining that rich people make better presidents or concluding that America's rich got that way by working harder than everyone else, he's fouling the intellectual air with thought-farts like this recent piece on gender and education (reprinted in The Age last week). Before we light a math and open a window let's bask in the heady pong of Brooks' opening paragraphs:

Honor Code, by David Brooks

Henry V is one of Shakespeare’s most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older. But suppose Henry went to an American school.

By about the third week of nursery school, Henry’s teacher would be sending notes home saying that Henry “had another hard day today.” He was disruptive during circle time. By midyear, there’d be sly little hints dropped that maybe Henry’s parents should think about medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many of the other boys are on it, and they find school much easier.

Laurence Olivier as Henry V

By elementary school, Henry would be lucky to get 20-minute snatches of recess. During one, he’d jump off the top of the jungle gym, and, by the time he hit the ground, the supervising teachers would be all over him for breaking the safety rules. He’d get in a serious wrestling match with his buddy Falstaff, and, by the time he got him in a headlock, there’d be suspensions all around.

First, Henry would withdraw. He’d decide that the official school culture is for wimps and softies and he’d just disengage. In kindergarten, he’d wonder why he just couldn’t be good. By junior high, he’d lose interest in trying and his grades would plummet.

Then he’d rebel. If the official high school culture was über-nurturing, he’d be über-crude. If it valued cooperation and sensitivity, he’d devote his mental energies to violent video games and aggressive music. If college wanted him to be focused and tightly ambitious, he’d exile himself into a lewd and unsupervised laddie subculture. He’d have vague high ambitions but no realistic way to realize them. Day to day, he’d look completely adrift.


This is roughly what’s happening in schools across the Western world. ...

* * * * *

Yes, something like this is happening all the time in schools across the Western world. Everywhere you look, Shakespearean heroes are being tormented by politically correct schoolmarms and faceless education bureaucrats. Just last week, Richard III was suspended for bullying, and Othello got detention for pulling the pigtails of one of his classmates. 

David Brooks as Overpaid Milquetoast Hack

It's easy to ridicule Brooks for the pretentiousness of his references and the sloppiness of his thinking and writing--and it's also a great deal of fun--but this particular piece of drivel is worth a closer look. In her book Symptoms of Culture, Marjorie Garber suggests that borrowing from Shakespeare works as a sort of rhetorical Viagra to artificially engorge a rather flaccid argument. Given that Brooks seems to be complaining that schools as institutions don't do enough to nurture institution-defying genius, judging by this case at least, Garber's diagnosis would seem to be pretty sound.

Things really don't get any better as the piece goes on. Brooks notes, apparently with displeasure, that "the education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious." The children "who don't fit this ideal" are not aggravating little shits, but potential geniuses and charismatic leaders, poised to whip some Frog arse at the Battle of Agincourt or do some other kind of Great Heroic Act that Would Give American Conservatives a Big Boner. 


Brooks continues by noting that "Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys." Of course, this is the problem. It's the "boy crisis." Brooks explains how "a decade or so ago, people started writing books and articles on the boy crisis. At the time, the evidence was disputable and some experts pushed back. Since then, the evidence that boys are falling behind has mounted. The case is closed. The numbers for boys get worse and worse." 


Even assuming that Brooks' description of the state of affairs is correct, we are entitled to ask a couple of questions. The first of these is, so what? Perhaps Brooks' glass of testosterone is not half empty but half full--that is, maybe we ought to look at the situation not as male underachievement but as girls fighting back against entrenched gender discrimination and at long last achieving closer to their full potential. The second question is, how, precisely, would rewarding rambunctiousness improve literacy performance and discipline among boys? I really doubt that encouraging wrestling and other forms of boyish boisterousness is going to result in a heightened appreciation of Shakespearean drama.


It seems significant that the normally staid Brooks--FFS, he blames the Sixties counterculture for Wall Street greed!--makes special pleading for boys' raucousness. To read Brooks usually means getting mercilessly flogged with a Victorian era sermon on the virtues of thrift, discipline and what not. Brooks isn't completely inconsistent here--he only seems to want to allow a bit of Y chromosome berserkery before bottling that carbonated testosterone up in government issue olive drab receptacles (yes, yes, David--what America really needs is a more martial culture. For God's sake, will someone think of the soldiers?!). In her guide to cultural symptoms, Marjorie Garber explains how the symptom is, as Freud put it, "a compromise formation": or, in Garber's words, the symptom is

quotation from pp 4-5

a sign of inner conflict, a symbol of conflicting desires. "I want to / but I am forbidden to"; 'I desire it / but I fear the consequences" 




There's certainly a lot to be said for looking at crises of masculinity this way. It certainly explains a lot of the special pleading that goes on for men and masculinity: in the early years of the 21st century, "men" means a special category of gendered individuals, not a synonym for a universal transcendent subject. This would simultaneously seem to give men (or, as I might put it, "us"--pretending for the moment that I'm a male of your species and not the supreme godly being you normally worship and adore) licence to make certain claims, thought there would have to be drawbacks, wouldn't there--like people asking why "we" had to go and fuck everything up so badly. 

Post the Fourth: Wherein the Author Shames Himself before an Albino

My two small children spent three glorious days at their grandparents recently. Glorious for their parents, that is, who did not accompany them. I don't actually know how great a time they had and never really gave it a lot of thought, since I refuse to ask too many questions when I'm offered the treat of not having to cook for or dress small people for days at a time.

At any rate, the hour of their return was nigh, and I arrived at the agreed-upon halfway point at which the shorty re-up was to transpire. I welcomed my children with the sort of joyful embraces that a parent gives to their returning beloved offspring, especially when said parent has momentarily forgotten that their return means the end of uninterrupted sleep, conversation and even thought for the foreseeable future.

My children, for their part, seem pleased enough to see me, but were more anxious to get home to their kitten, separation from whom meant that they had had to be content with each other and their own head lice for animal companionship. There was a colossal pet shop nearby, and my girls wanted to celebrate their imminent inter-species reunion with a gift for their kitten, who in all likelihood would feign appreciation for her new toy mouse or whatever and then go back to de-upholstering our furniture. As the household was rather low on a number of pet sundries, and I knew that prices at this establishment had recently been slashed from outrageous to merely exorbitant, I agreed to have a look inside.

For those who have not been around a pet shop for a while, there are certain so-called improvements you should know about. It is now forbidden to make monkeys smoke, bears dance, or, in short, allow any of the creatures to have any fun at all. Presumably this is to make it easier for them to say goodbye when they leave for their new homes. After all, if the single malts flowed freely they'd probably never want to leave.  This sort of attitude when taken to its nanny state extreme often results in pet shops not selling puppies or kittens at all, since there's evidently something wrong with buying adorable helpless animals on a holiday shopping whim and then taking them for a very  long and disorienting walk in the country at the first sign that the cuteness is about to wear off.

Fortunately, this wasn't such an establishment. Not quite, anyway. It was entirely puppy free, but along the back wall there were a couple of well-fattened adult mogs behind glass, whom the pet shop owners (on behalf of a local animal charity) were offering for "adoption"--a sort of euphemistic sleight-of-hand, which, like the phrase "escort services," fools no one. A plaque beside their enclosure presented a message from the larger of the two felines, a portly two year old white and ginger male. The note was  written in first-person feline narration to achieve the sort of intimacy in style favoured by Salinger and Twain. "My owner could not longer care for my brother and me," it read, "and we have nowhere else to go. We have been through so much stress already, we really could not bear to be separated." So far, so Dickensian. "We require a good home with a loving owner"--and here was the part that grabbed my attention--"and I need to be an indoor-only cat, because my fair nose and ears mean I risk skin cancer if exposed to too much sunlight."

I read this last part aloud, because it was the reason I had given my own daughters for keeping our kitty inside. As I finished reading these words about sunlight, fair features and skin cancer, I turned around and noticed that my daughters were not within earshot, but a young albino boy was.

 I know I'm in no way to blame here. I was just reading a sign, and how often do you see albinos anyway? I really wish I were making this up, but unfortunately this is the sort of thing that happens to me all the time, because there is some sort of unwritten law that if you embarrass very easily then genuinely embarrassing things happen to you all the time. Evidently there was a memo I missed at some point informing me that Ricky Gervais would be a script consultant on my life. I've had my suspicions before, but now I know for sure, and I also know that somewhere in Melbourne's suburbs there's a young albino kid crying to his mother because he wanted to get a kitty, but all he got was insensitive comments from a middle-aged American man.

Maybe I'm the one they shouldn't let outside.

Celluloid Widowers

I finally caught The Descendants on DVD the other day, and fairly underwhelming as it was, two thoughts came to me as its first act unfolded.

The first, and more minor of these, concerned the oeuvre of the film's director Alexander Payne. It's been years since I saw Election, which I don't remember much of except the fact that I enjoyed it quite a bit: darkly comical, with very good performances by Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, an actress whose not inconsiderable pulchritude, a friend of mine once claimed, derived in large part from her wildly flaring nostrils. Also, props to Payne for his attempts to revive that most Kurosawian of punctuations, the wipe cut. But I digress ...

I skipped About Schmidt when it came out, either through carelessness or a seasonal allergy to Jack Nicholson performances, I forget which. I also skipped Payne's next film, Sideways, about a road trip to wineries, because the only way I'm going to watch a film about a man visiting wineries is if the South Australia Tourist Board kidnaps me, straps me to a chair, and goes all Clockwork Orange on me glazzies.

But back to The Descendants. Payne follows up a story of vineyard ramblings with the story of Mike King (George Clooney), a Hawaiian lawyer managing a family land trust, a premise which probably brings the likes of Peter Costello into the sort of raptures that Filipinas wielding chainsaws induce in Quentin Tarantino. If this trend of boojy whiteness continues, in a few years Payne's going to make Woody Allen look like Ken Loach.

Of course, there's more to The Descendants than the joys of seeing George Clooney in suburban lawyer bad trousers (and, damn his handsome soul if he doesn't look good even in Dockers). The land deal financial drama takes place alongside the grander strife of King's marital woes, as he copes with the news that his now comatose wife had been cheating on him. It's not long into the film before we learn that Mrs King's got no chance of waking up, an unsurprising turn of events because, as my wife suggested, if you won't come out of a coma for George Clooney, there's not much modern medicine can do for you.


But this matter brings me to my second point, an observation on a more important Hollywood trend. What is it with all the dead wives? I get how the mourning leading man readily produces a crisis that's a good starting off point for any number of (melo)dramatic plot turns, but I think there's a prevalence to this symptom that requires some careful attention. Just off the top of my head, there's The Descendants and Pixar's Up--damn if that romance montage doesn't get me misted up every time--and, it seems, just about every film that Clint Eastwood has starred in. "Dirty" Harry Callahan is, famously, an itchy-trigger finger widower, and the Unforgiven's William Munny is an ex-gunfighter and widower whose pathological mourning leads Morgan Freeman to coyly suggest there might be some therapeutic benefits in Wild West Wankery.  A few years before Clooney donned his Descendants Dockers, old Clint rocked the daggy widower pants to good effect in Gran Torino. I can't remember if Clint was a widower in Million Dollar Baby, but it's significant that he's estranged from his adult daughter and can only find unofficial family love, in the form of his relationship with stand-in daughter Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). Morgan Freeman also costars in Million Dollar Baby, but makes no mention of self-love this time. 


Clooney does give a great performance in The Descendants, even if his auratic film star beauty means that he's not quite as convincing as he could be in the role (a similar problem plagued Angelina Jolie's great performance in the Clint Eastwood directed The Changeling). Clooney's Matt King admits that he's always been the "back-up parent" (shades of Homer Simpson's defensive response to Marge's insistence that he look after their children: "But I'm their father!"), too busy with his career blah blah blah. In an essay on fatherhood, Thomas Laqueur cited Freud's claim that there's a parallel between monotheistic religions and patriarchy: both value the unseen and unempirical, against the very tangible evidence of matriarchy and the animistic worship of nature. The father is (or should be) transcendent, and we're not quite sure what to do with him when he has to actually get his hands dirty and do some real parenting. It'd be so much easier if we could get mum out of the way, and then we wouldn't have to deal with her nagging about making the bed or insisting there be vegetables with every meal. It'd be so much easier if she just wasn't around, and easier still if the real kids weren't around, and if we had to do anything to earn our keep we could just lend a hand with the neighbourhood Hmongs or the hillbilly she-boxers. 


In The Descendants Clooney at least has to take care of his own children, who will probably be kept in line by the sheer power of his silver haired and chiseled jaw force field. The ending looks happy enough: Clooney and his two daughters, on the couch watching the doting penguin fathers of March of the Penguins, a documentary narrated by the honey-voiced Morgan Freeman, who, if I recall correctly, has some saucy suggestions for keeping warm in those cold Antarctic winters.

Footy Rain Man and New Age Dog Talk

So I was standing in a local park having what I assumed was going to be the strangest conversation of the day.

My faithful (I have my suspicions) hound and I had just run into a longtime dog-walking acquaintance, who was exercising her own canine companions. Or, two of them at least. Her third terrier, the oldest of the group, sat in her arms, looking like a not particularly comely species of mangy rodent (to clarify: the dog looked that way; the owner's arms appeared perfectly normal and non-ratty).

Now, the aetiology of this poor nipper's condition is not important here. For one thing, the old fella was, I was assured, on the mend. And, more importantly, his (rather unbelievably) improved state of health was, according to his owner's account, due entirely to alternative veterinary medicine. Yes, you read correctly. These things exist. On some deeply disavowed level I knew this, in the same way that I know there are people out there who actually like Tony Abbott (since we're on the subject of mangy rodents). I didn't really know how widespread and complex this New Age pet ownership was, but as this chat progressed, I found out. There's Hound Homeopathy, Rover Reiki, and probably dozens of other non-traditional veterinary practices that do not readily lend themselves to my facile attempts at domesticated animal-related wordplay.  There is an entire parallel pet ownership universe out there, populated by dog and mog-loving mung bean types who are, on some (probably unwitting) level, disciples of Ivan Illich and Michel "Birth of the Vet Clinic" Foucault. 


My acquaintance is a lovely and kind woman, and at a couple of points in the chat she would preface an upcoming claim about auras or reincarnation or Shar Pei Chakras (okay, that's the last one, I promise) with the line "I don't know what your beliefs are, but ...." I listened attentively and politely, made vague noises that could be construed as I'm open minded to your beliefs, when in fact I think that at  some point in your life you appear to have gone completely batshit. 


It was about at this point that our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of quite a verbose man on a BMX bicycle. He was a rather pear-shaped gentleman, with pasty skin, and though he appeared to be around 30 years old, he looked--and I think always would look--as if his mother dressed him. He looked, in short, like the sort of man who at some point in his life gave serious thought to the possibility of developing real-life light sabres or dilithium crystals. He pedalled right up to us, and without pausing for a gap in conversation or  an appropriate facial cue, informed us that "The 1989 Footscray Bulldogs had the third best defence in the VFL. Only two other teams gave up fewer points than the Dogs. Now, had did they manage to finish in seventh place, then? Well, obviously, their offensive capabilities left something to be desired. The best defence in the world is going to be no help at all winning games if you can't put any points on the board." This was spat out, pretty much needless to say, with the level of non-mellifluousness with which one of Dustin Hoffman's more famous characters sang the praises of Judge Wapner. This was then reprised, with intricate variations, like a sort of Bach Fugue for Sporting Statistics and Severe Autism, non-stop for the next five minutes or seven hours or so.


It is a strange feeling, having to listen so intently and insincerely, especially to people who are not members of your own family. Stranger still is finding yourself silently choking on the question, "Can I please go back to talking about alternative pet medicine?" It was one of my more unusual days out, though, with just a slight advance in speed, and the addition of a Myki reader and some garish upholstery, it could have been a garden variety tram journey.

okay, may perhaps cry in public