By A. Daniel Bodine
desertmountaintimes.com
Pardon me for not being so excited, but I just have the feeling this ol' debate topic has been around for awhile, distinguished in many different versions of financial greenery always. That this one was billed as “Oxford-style live” doesn't win any extra points either.
So don't expect me to check today's headlines to see who won last night's skirmish at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on whether men are finished in the face of the new economy exploding across the world now—an economy that does, indeed, appear to favor women. For whatever the reasons.
“Men Are Finished,” shouted a headline in a Sept. 9 edition of the online magazine, Slate, announcing the debate. “Women now earn the majority of college degrees. Men play video games. Women thrive in information-age jobs. Men go to prison. Women hold families together. Men watch football.”
As a people, no to this one-upmanship, should be our message. For we've been there and done that gig before, with pain often; and shame on the promoters for this.
With the nation staring at unemployment rates and housing woes portending another Great Depression, this is no time for either side of this perennial, old debate topic to be rubbing salt into sore wounds.
The debate was to've been between ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams and Hanna Rosin, award-winning journalist for Slate and the Atlantic Magazine, arguing for the motion, that yes, “Men are finished”; and feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers and Men's Health Magazine editor-in-chief David Zinezenko, arguing against it.
Why the topic was recycled at this time is a wild guess. The debate was one of a series called Intelligence 2 (as in the index, Squared) sponsored by a New York City group, which earlier in Slate said beginning in 2006 they'd hoped “to provide a new forum for intelligent discussion” by promoting dialogues on contentious subjects. Supposedly they've put on 50 such debates now on various topics.
Thus an intelligent discussion last night, given the subject, I'm sure it was. But the sincerity in advance of it sure seemed hallow, however.
“Ladies, give yourself a night off from your second job as an astronaut or neurosurgeon,” the ticket-selling promo stated. “Men, take a break from your fantasy football league to see if you can save yourself.”
I can see corpocracy's minions laughing with their champagne glasses while sampling onion-dip finger foods at the affair, but friends, 'tis not the time for those kind of words, not to most of us.
Working people are working people, whether it's those left behind on jobs to do the extra work for those whose positions have been eliminated in these difficult times; or those in the growing ranks of the unemployed frustrated and beaten down because they've unsuccessfully sought employment for a year or more now.
“Men are finished” now, they're told? Go crawl off somewhere and die, you slimebag is the new message to propel us as a human race into this new age?
Opposite this, indeed, there's little on the horizon to indicate the economic picture will get brighter in the next year or so, especially with a lock-jawed Congress, apparently.
I've followed, sometimes humorously, a website called “Economic Collapse” for two years or so now. But as this economy worsens, readers of such doomsayers naturally start wondering: These guys are economic experts. Maybe things are this bad?
How are such messages going to help? Here's from the site's today's post:
“The number of good jobs continues to decline, more stores are closing, incomes continue to go down, credit card debt and student loan debt are soaring, the housing market resembles a corpse, the number of Americans living in poverty continues to rise and government debt is at unprecedented levels. We are losing blood fast, and almost all of our leaders are either too corrupt or too incompetent to be able to do anything about it.”
Is this really the time then to giggle that men are finished?
I remember a similar time in this men vs. women debate. When Vietnam looked as though it would be the loss it would turn out to be. Fresh out of the Navy, I was a student at the old North Texas State University in Denton in '72, I think; and a paper came out with a story about men in panty hose and high heels in a cocktail bar serving the new, dominant clientele—high-finance, professional businesswomen. And I remember how squeamish I felt about the story. The future, supposedly.
But decades later millions of men and women around the globe still find happiness and contentment in family relationships with each other. Billie Jean King in tennis and Ed “Too Tall” Jones for the Dallas Cowboys both have come and gone, and in their wake there's slowly been a growing acceptance of people “of difference” in society; and, too, most admirably, a swelling, vertical integration of women in virtually every profession from banking and finance to health.
What's with all this stuff today? Corporate bigwigs and such (who yes, naturally have good financial reasons to smile) creating “intelligent discussions” by arguing that because the economy is changing (perhaps to reflect the introduction of so many different new factors into it), “men are finished?”
And that's not dumb? Whose mea culpa is that? And whose responsibility is it to rise above it?
One thing's obvious to this ol' country boy. You don't kick people when they're down. Kick 'em when they're up yelling at you; kick 'em when they're taking something from you. But not when they're flat on their back. That'll follow 'ya to the bowels of hell itself.
Excluding the fact the issue itself is rather passe to start with. So, just entertainment?
This was a stupid debate.
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