My own page for the last coupla years has been Medium, which means by now I’ve come to alter or disagree with about a third of what I wrote there. Also . . . Medium shut me down over some woke-ish lunacy. I call this new page Molting for a good reason. About every two-to-ten years, I have a tendency to shed my skin intellectually speaking . . . though referring to myself as “an intellectual” is a stretch.
By way of introduction, I’m a seventy-two-year-old married man with four kids and eight grands. I’m a bit of a hillbilly with roots in Arkansas, Missouri, and North Carolina, transplanted into Southeast Michigan, where we live on our Social Security and my Army retirement.
Yep, I was a lifer in the Army, which begins a brief narration of how I got here.
I wasn’t just a lifer, I was part of the Army that was/is the most up-close-violent and illegal (and consequently the most secretive). Slowly—I regretfully admit— I came, as a human being with a few suppressed vestiges of miserocordia, to hate my “job,” as well as the Army, which is a sprawling and mindless bureaucracy.
I retired and became an outspoken critic of the state and especially its military adventures. Withing three weeks of my retirement, I became a card-carrying communist. There were multiple motivations for that decision, some of them faulty, and while I remained active on the left for nearly twenty years, I shape-shifted between organizations (molting, see?).
The acme of my “activist” career was during the build-up for and conduct of Bush II’s psychotic wars in Southwest Asia. I’m shocked nowadays at how that administration, which was one vast criminal conspiracy, is being rehabilitated, but I digress.
Back then (before the equally criminal Obama was elected and anti-war sentimient evaporated and exposed woke liberals as clueless performative hypocrites) war veterans who opposed the Afghanistan/Iraq horror show were prized on the left for several reasons: inoculation of movments from accusations of non-patriotism (ironic, in my case, because I’ve been on a soapbox from the beginning against patriotism of all kinds), testimonies (I saw this as a good thing, being a witness as were many other vets), and (worst of all) so the left could lay claim to its own alpha males.
I even did a coupla documentary films: Hijacking Catastrophe and The Tillman Story.
At any rate, I started writing a good deal. I write to communicate of course, but its also how I work things out in my own mind, and in doing so I was confronted with the question, “What is militarism?”
This was a twofold process: first, protracted self-examination led me to the role of violent constructions of masculinity, and second, I undertook a deep, years-long dive into feminism. The latter, because feminists had the most to say to this man about why I had been the way I had been.
As a leftist, for some time prior to my conversion, I was still committed to a violent (and very masculine) vision of revolution; and it was only when I began a study of post-liberal Christian thinkers (after being introduced to the philosopher Ivan Illich and theologian Stanley Hauerwas), that embraced a commitment to nonviolence. I also became a Christian. Molting.
I wrote a long book about my masculinity-war thesis, called Borderline (nothing to do with the DSM or Madonna), in which I explored the myriad ways throughout history that masculinities reproduce wars and wars in turn reproduce violent masculinities.
Wrote two other books after that, one addressing the question, “If war is a masculine enterprise, what about women in the military?” That book is Tough Gynes: Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men. The other book is about money as an ecological phenomenon, and that one is called Mammon’s Ecology: Metaphysic of the Empty Sign.
I remain a firm anti-capitalist (no one who takes the Gospels seriously, in my view, could be anything but), but I also came to realize that capitalism is just the economic engine of modernity, which required its own new religion—Progress.
I have ranted against this poisonous notion since 2006 when I had an epiphany in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast and began reading Illich.
Progress is bringing you a new film, Climate Apocalypse, to accompany its earlier films, The War on Subsistence and All Restraint is Bad Unless it is Profitable.
At any rate, trying to keep this little introductory story short, there were several more moltings that carried me to where I am today . . . about rub my nose on a rock for another peel.
I arrived today at the Planet Substack, after reading a brilliant reflection here, called Upheaval, by a fella named N. S. Lyons. And in this piece, he pointed me at another Substack denizen named Mary Harrington, who has blown my geriatric mind by clarifying many of my own preoccupations about where feminism has gone (and where it came from), in particular around the issue of (drum roll please) Gender.
As a way of getting the cancellations out of the way earlier than later, here’s a link to something I wrote on the “gender wars” aka “TERF wars,” that lost me a couple dozen authoritarian gnostic Facebook “friends,” and made me a pariah with the infantile left here in my little post-industrial corn-town. After reading Mary Harrington’s thoughts, my understanding of what I was writing about in the preceding link has been enlarged, and even more thoroughly integrated now with some of my anti-Progress rants in Borderline. There goes that skin again.
I’ve kept you long enough for a mere introduction, and so I will mercifully close.
Peace be with you.
Stan
Very happy to see you here Mr. Goff. I followed your work on Medium. It was all very helpful. I liked Fishing Family. I have three adult daughters. I read Tough Gynes to help me talk with them about some not helpful limitations in the feminist theory one of them shared with me. When the medium link shut down I started hoping you would migrate here. I agree with you about Lyons and Harrington. If you haven’t read Kingsnorth’s work on Substack already, I would recommend it.The love of God is real. Again, I’m very happy to see that you are writing here.