Let it Breathe, Part 1

 Woman as nurturing mother...
the late Myra Kraft helping to feed women in need. 

When I find myself in times of trouble Brother Nobby comes to me Speaking words of wisdom Let it breathe…
Indeed. As I have done often throughout my life, when I find myself waking up to disruption and chaos, I turn to the blog’s namesake and sage, Norman O. Brown. Nobby studied the world of human dreams as they manifest themselves in mythology, poetry and psychoanalysis. His reach was deep and complex, thus he would have no place in our world of pundits and talking heads. He wasn’t at all interested in whatever was passing for “breaking news” on any given day. He was only interested in the stories of our collective subconscious…or unconscious…those stories that actually create the veil we call breaking news. So whenever things get crazy as they are, I go back to Nobby to reassure myself that the craziness didn’t just come about on November 8, 2016. It has ancient roots in our species. If I have one major, overriding frustration with my friends on the political left, it is their obsession with making all things literal, thus dismissing the power of metaphor and myth to explain things that predate by eons the wit of Charles Pierce, the wisdom of Bill Moyers, the wonkiness of Nate Silver. Readers should take this as sort of a surgeon general’s warning that reading this blog for the next two weeks could be harmful to your comfort and comprehension level if you’re unwilling to accept that things can and do happen beneath the surface of our day-to-day existence. So let it breathe…
In the chapter "Nature", in Love’s Body, Nobby writes:

Who is my real mother? It is a political question…The fraternity is itself the mother. “The journey of initiation is ended. It goes from the mothers to the mothers. Although in reality the young man is henceforth to be separated from the mother, symbolically he is brought back to her…The young man is put into a hole and reborn--this time under the auspices of his male mothers.” Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys” we two are friends”, they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or “penis womb.” The fathers telling the sons, “leave your mother and love us, because we too, have a vagina.” Dionysius, the god of eternal youth, and of secret societies was the twice born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, caught the baby to his thigh, saying: “Come enter this my male womb.”…Male mothers; "shield bearing nurses", the political authorities...From the mothers to the mothers. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is always with us, and gets us nowhere.

Okay, I admit, that’s a load…a mother lode as it were. Let me try to ground it in some of that surface reality of ours.
First off, in 2014 Josh Miller, a member of the Arkansas Legislature, captured unwanted attention when he helped lead the drive against Medicaid expansion for his state. The fact that he was a Republican made this unremarkable; what made it remarkable was that he was confined to a wheelchair since a car accident involving alcohol left him paralyzed…and because he was uninsured it fell to Medicare and Medicaid to pay more than $1 million for his rebab.  
Second, as the Republican House of Representatives recently cobbled together a health bill that would get A Win! for their frat house rather than improve the nation’s health, one of the nastier pieces of their package was a limitation on maternity coverage. Charles Krauthammer, a leading intellectual of the American Right, made the case thusly:

Even more significant would be stripping out the heavy-handed Obamacare coverage mandate that dictates what specific medical benefits must be included in every insurance policy in the country, regardless of the purchaser’s desires or needs. Best to mandate nothing. Let the customer decide. A 60-year-old couple doesn’t need maternity coverage. Why should they be forced to pay for it? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need lactation services.

Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine, showed no intellectual mercy in going after Krauthammer who, like Miller, is also confined to a wheelchair:

It is callous enough that Republicans apply their every-man-for-himself logic to health care, and land on the belief that those fortunate enough to be blessed with good health should not be burdened with the cost of paying for the medical needs of others. But when the advocate of this argument himself has expensive medical needs, the callousness rises to a level of solipsistic barbarism. A paraplegic man resents having to pay for women who need help breastfeeding their babies. Why should those women have to buy insurance that covers wheelchairs?

It is completely understandable if someone wants to dismiss the actions of Miller and Krauthammer as garden-variety hypocrisy...and given Krauthammer’s gratuitous swipe at lactation perhaps a charge of misogyny is due as well. But I didn’t drag Norman O. Brown into this discussion simply to make an observation even Joe Scarborough could make. I think there’s something more at work here. In the closing days of the 2016 Presidential Campaign when the apparent misogyny reached what Freud might have termed hysterical levels, I started to wonder if what we were witnessing was less base hatred of women, and rather more complex fear of female elements. There seemed to be a growing fear of such feminine characteristics as empathy and nurturing becoming manifest in the nation's identity, perhaps trickling down on the children and robbing the country of its manliness. 
In short, I think there may be a direct line between contemporary partisan obsessions with creation of “a nanny state" and transgender bathrooms and the ancient pull of fraternity. Men, like Miller and Krauthammer, strike out against compassion because they perceive it as a woman thing. Having been rendered forever vulnerable by fate, they need to prove their manhood every day to the fraternity. Though not cursed to pass an initiation rite as often, those not physically disabled, nonetheless, have to prove themselves worthy of the fraternity regularly by denouncing, demeaning, and denying the essential feminine side of human existence.
Take for example, Robert Kraft, owner of The New England Patriots, long-time friend and notable supporter of Donald Trump. In a recent interview, Bloomberg Newsasked Kraft to describe his relationship with Trump and here’s part of how he answered:

… when my wife, bless her memory, died of ovarian cancer [Trump] flew up to the funeral with Melania. They came to my home. And he called me once a week for a year and invited me to things. That was the darkest period of my life. And I’m a pretty strong person. But my kids thought I was going to die. There were five or six people who were great to me. He was one of them.Loyalty and friendship and relationships trump politics for me…I really believe that he wants to make this country better. And he’s grown in the job. I’ve seen it, too. For me, it’s like having a high school buddy or a fraternity brother become president. It’s weird in a way, but it’s cool.

Kraft, here, is like Norman O. Brown’s initiate emerging from the hole ("the darkest period of my life") into the waiting arms of Trump...the fraternity. It’s cool! 
But here’s the cost that is totally lost on Kraft and so many like him. To be cool (as opposed to warm and loving), it means turning your back on mother…on wife…on daughter, sister, grandma…those nurturing influences on our lives and our culture. Kraft’s wife Myra was renowned as a nurturing, socially conscious public figure. We could fairly well assume she would have been appalled by a national health bill that went out of its way to punish women (not to mention policies that demonized immigrants). What men like Robert Kraft who claim “loyalty and friendship and relationships trump politics” are really saying is this: “Who is my real mother? It is a political question…The fraternity is itself my mother.”