Tough Guys
I’m a tough guy most of the time, but a tender guy at other times. I’m big and burly and I ride big motorcycles and have been the breadwinner for several families worth of dependants. That and the fact that I survived forty-five years in the top ranks of Wall Street, one of the tough guy arenas, makes me fit the tough guy profile. Buy I cry at sad movies and have a very liberal warm spot in my heart for those less fortunate or those oppressed. I’m not a hunter, but then I am also not a gatherer. I like being in charge and doing for myself, but have a sense of design and aesthetics that is generally not the province of the tough guys of the world. Does that make me gender-confused or ambiguous? I don’t really think so. I’ve been called lots of things in my day, but being gay has never been one of them, and unlike some guys who will admit to some degree of uncertainty in the heat of the moment or the drunkenness of youth, I have always had a very clear sense of my sexual preferences and they have not strayed from the strict hetero sphere.
A friend, Chris, who is a production designer and art director of major films recently emailed me to get my view on the recent writers and actors strike that is plaguing Hollywood. Unlike with something like the potential UPS drivers strike or a pilot’s strike, I suspect there is some degree of wavering that goes on in people’s minds about how they feel about unions and striking when the issue at hand is the creative efforts of entertainment industry workers. In fact, some people might not even completely comprehend that the job of writing or acting is, indeed, work, per se. Planes not flying or packages not being delivered is a real inconvenience to consumers, but not having a movie stay on production schedule or the next installment of a favorite series be available on time may not rise to that same level of concern. It is fair, even in a Maslowian sense, that the hierarchy of needs causes the arts and entertainment realm to rank higher on the pyramid and thus lower on the priority list. What I told Chris in a somewhat detached and unimpassioned way was that I believed that the pendulum had swung too much towards favoring capital and those who guide its use rather than the artists who produce the creative content that forms the basis of most of the show. Things in the world at large have gotten out of whack since 1980 and have now created a problem that is hindering progress because labor of all types does not command a sufficiently decent wage to meet people’s basic needs in our modern high-tech society.
While that may sound anti-capitalistic or even socialistic to some, it is quite the opposite. I believe in predominantly free enterprise where the means of production are privately owned. There certainly is a need for public utilities that cannot be governed by monopoly, oligopoly or even the profit motive, and there is room for much broader debate about what constitutes the boundaries of such utilities, but I am comfortable we could craft a delineation that would leave the vast majority of productive capacity in private hands. I also believe that bullying and predatory behavior of all types is bad and that there have to be guardrails on capitalism that allow unionization that can level the playing field between capital and labor. Collective bargaining needs to have wide boundaries, but boundaries nonetheless, understanding that at times capital will be in the power seat and at other times labor will enjoy that advantage. I am prepared to believe that common purpose exists in both directions but also know that a higher power (the government in this case) may be needed to encourage cooperation, if only in the most drastic of circumstances.
National Geographic, my go-to source for all sorts of good ideas, fed me two articles of interest today. The first you can probably guess, is about the last time there was a major writers and actors strike, which was in 1960. It was prompted in many ways by the changing distribution pattern of theater-viewed moviegoing versus home-viewed television programming. It’s less than coincidental that streaming, which affects both theatrical movie-going and home television viewing whether by traditional networks or cable networks, is at the center of this version of a distribution crisis in the industry. But the interesting factoid that no one is missing is that in 1960, the two faces of the entertainment union landscape that everyone recognizes were Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan. How ironic that the pre-union movie tough guys became anti-union conservative tough guys twenty years later and spearheaded the hugely impactful trickle-down economics and the NRA with its Second Amendment libertarian fixation. That’s irony you can cut with a knife that gives a whole lifecycle lesson about how people start life with nothing and lots of liberal ideology and morph into hardened conservatives who want to hold onto all they have and more.
The second article I saw was about a recent 9,000 year-old archeological discovery in Peru that generated the title, “Prehistoric female hunter discovery upends gender role assumptions”. I was far less surprised to find that archaeologists are discovering that women joined the hunt occasionally, but rather that based on one sampling of 27 hunter burial mounds that they found that 11 of the 27 (41%) were female and 16 (59%) were male. That implies that women were almost equally tasked to hunt as were men. Rather than just say that everyone in the clan hunted, the archeologists are suggesting based on this and other findings which have been largely ignored or overlooked in the past, that prehistoric man had as much gender identity and fluidity issues in his and her midst as we do today. It is much easier to determine male versus female markers in archeological findings than it is to determine gender identification, but archeologists are forced to acknowledge now that there clearly were such issues and there were far less hard and fast traditional gender barriers than we may have ever realized. The old trope that a woman with an unweaned infant simply couldn’t do certain high-focus things like hunt, are being thrown out the window. I’ll bet that the next finding is that the gatherer side has evidence of male involvement because, as they say, what’s good for the goose is usually good for the gander as well.
What would Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston (or John Wayne for that matter) think of all of that? Maybe what I should ask is what would they have thought of it in 1960 and then in 1980 and then again today . That is a complex set of variables that include the cultural changes in our nation over two generations as well as the aging and evolving ideologies of prominent cultural leaders and role models. They used to be tough guys for the collective of labor and then became tough guys for the capitalist tools (as Malcolm Forbes, a man with his own gender identification issues, used to call himself). In some ways they can be said to have caused more good and more bad for our nation and our people than can be easily measured in either direction.
I voted for Reagan and I used to love Heston movies like Planet of the Apes or The Ten Commandments or Omega Man (funny to realize that he always seems to play roles of the tough guy iconoclast…so maybe his intentions were as they seemed). But I feel like their good intentions may have gotten out of control and the perhaps unintended consequences have caused societal distortion to which neither man would want to lay claim. The best example of that may be on the gender identification front. The current right-wing agenda, as most often exemplified in Ron DeSantis’ gender identity machinations, is probably not happy with the recent Peruvian Stone Age findings. Moses would have smote those archeologists like he did Sodom and Gomorrah. But Astronaut George Taylor had lots of respect for Dr. Zira and her enlightened view of the world of apes and humans. Let’s just conclude that tough guys can be tough, but they too have to define tough in a changing world.