Here is Bob Homans.
Power plays
This is an insight in two parts. First I make observations on the power plays around my house and in our life - in this instance Eddie’s school. Tomorrow I will extrapolate to the world scene, specifically the philanthropaths.
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Any parent of little kids knows how they squabble. About anything. One of them is playing with a toy, and though there are 50 other toys lying around the other one wants precisely what the first is playing with. Loud crying ensues.
If one of them is sitting on Daddy’s lap, another one comes along to push her off. There are of course two knees, and room to the side, but they do not want accommodation. They want to fight.
Fighting for power is part of the human condition. More than human – it is widely evident in the animal kingdom. Chickens have their pecking order. Gorillas have their alpha male. Troops of chimpanzees have, in addition to alpha males, their matriarch who keeps the ladies in line.
The family serves as a laboratory setting for studying power plays. My family has two matriarchs – Oksana and her mother. Here are a few examples of power plays.
There is the “wake the baby” power play. Even though Marianna is asleep upstairs, and has a track record of sleeping through missile strikes, the minute a male member of the family walks to the front door he is cautioned to “Shhhh - don’t wake the baby.” They see no irony in the fact that the admonition is louder than whatever noise he is making. I am sure that their objective has little to do with the baby. It’s to make sure he knows who’s in charge.
There is the same game with feeding the children. I point out that one scarcely ever sees starving children on the streets, or reads about child corpses in the newspaper. Children will ensure that they get enough to eat. Nonetheless, you are not being a proper parent unless you stand over the child forcing mouthful after mouthful of food down their throats. The food has to be just so: a balance of proteins and carbohydrates, properly heated, no older than from yesterday so there are no microbes, properly cut up for their little mouths. The rules are neither written nor consistent. The only thing that is well understood is that a man can never understand them. He is always wrong.
The game applies as well to neatness. I am the only one in the house who makes his bed. I pester the kids to pick up their clothes off the floor. Though I should insist that they not throw it in the wash unless it is dirty, I accept that they find it easiest just to call it all dirty and let dad deal with it. Most of the time I put the wash in the machine and hang it to dry. I put away what I can and have the kids put away what is theirs when I don’t recognize it. I take out the garbage. But who gets gigged on account of the mess? Right. Dear old Dad. Somebody will make a big, virtuous show of getting a broom to sweep the floor, casting an accusing glance at Dad because he hadn’t done it.
It applies as well to health. The school called us Tuesday to pick up Eddie. He had thrown up. Though it happens every couple of weeks, this was the first time at school. He has a nervous stomach. They apparently have a policy that a parent has to pick sick kids up. I was willing, but Oksana was already in town with the girls. Their taxi swung by the school and got him.
Oksana’s friend Vika thinks she has lactose intolerance. Therefore, their whole family must have it. She only drinks vegetarian products – almond and coconut milk. She has Oksana believing that Eddie has lactose intolerance. Eddie and I don’t see a correlation between his drinking milk, which he does all the time, and these episodes, which occur only every couple of weeks. I pooh-pooh the notion and Eddie tries to avoid the issue.
This morning Eddie didn’t eat his breakfast. His mom had gotten up earlier than usual and made sure that he had amaranth cereal with coconut milk. He doesn’t like either. After losing an argument on the subject, he just didn’t eat it. He let me pour the half a bowl that was left over into my oatmeal with milk. This violates all sorts of rules about microbes, proper breakfast and so on. Thank goodness nobody was watching.
Oksana constantly complains that Eddie resists her advice. I offer the opinion that Eddie is generally old enough to make his own judgments about his health. More than that, forcing him to do things he doesn’t like makes him resist all the more. I’m in a Catch-22. I would like to support my wife, but I’m not going to agree to stupid and counterproductive measures. If she wants to force him to eat stuff he doesn’t want and doesn’t need, she is on her own.
Repeating a power play litany that dates back to Eve, she complains “You can never understand. I carried him for nine months and spent nine hours delivering him. Isn’t there any gratitude?” She claims, “If he is sick, I’m the one who has to stay home with him.” This is not so – I’m also around the house, and Eddie doesn’t want to be around us even when he is home. He spends his time at the computer or reading. Oksana charges that because I don’t agree with her diagnosis, I don’t care about his health. The chain of causality is something as follows:
· Eddie is drinking milk, therefore
· He throws up, therefore
· Oksana must go to school to pick him up, therefore
· Oksana’s day is ruined, and moreover
· Eddie will grow up sickly, and
· It’s all my fault.
A implies B implies C implies D… right down the line. I don’t agree with any link in the chain of supposed causal connections. But the power play works. He is finally scheduled for a laboratory test for lactose tomorrow. I am glad to lay it to rest.
For what it’s worth, Zoriana saw the doctor about her cough. An all-morning effort. Not a word from anybody about how that turned out. I can only conclude that the doctor concluded, as I had maintained, that it is a respiratory virus and she needs to dress well and get over it.
Eddie also has a chronic problem with his nose. It is often stuffed up. He may well inherit it from me – I also have a stuffy nose and cannot survive without a handkerchief in my pocket. My mother was somewhat the same. We have been to the doctor many times about Eddie’s issue and haven’t come up with a solution. Nonetheless:
· We need to take Eddie to the doctor (again) to take care of his nose, because
· He is chewing with his mouth open, because
· His nose is blocked again, because
· I don’t care enough to do anything about it.
My solution is pretty easy and seems to work. I tell him to chew with his mouth closed. When I remind him, he does. It is part of a pattern that characterized me as a boy. He also puts his chin down at plate level and shovels his food in. That has nothing to do with his nose – just learning to be civilized. Boys are like that. A parent’s job is to civilize the children. You don’t need doctors; you just need resolve.
So much for power plays around home. The female teachers at Eddie’s school have their own power plays.
I have written about the first, which was to tell Eddie not to wear Hawaiian shirts or wear torn jeans to school. I accepted with good grace that he needed to dress appropriately. I bought him dress shirts and chinos. The deal was that he would wear one set of clothes until it was dirty – two or three days – so I only had to iron two or three sets of pants and shirts once a week. I am pleased at the way he looks.
This week I noticed the shirts in the wash every day. I asked Eddie why that was. He said that his teacher insisted that the kids wear clean clothes every day. She cannot stand the smell when they wear the same piece of clothing twice.
I smelled the shirt in question and could not detect any odor at all. I sweat far more than Eddie does. I wear my shirts for two or three days, washing them when they don’t pass the sniff test. I told him the teacher was being ridiculous. I am not going to wash and iron his shirts every day. If he is going to submit to the teacher’s power play, he can damn well iron them himself.
I proposed that if he simply wears shirts on alternate days the teacher will have no way of knowing whether or not it was washed in between. He says he doesn’t want to be embarrassed by having her smell it and call him out. He put his shirt back in the wash. A power play with Dear Old Dad.
What should I do? Give in? Expect him to do the ironing himself? Let him look sloppy in unironed shirts?
I’m going to be sneaky. I’m going to lightly iron the “dirty” shirts without washing them and give them back to him as clean, washing only when I deem that they are dirty. I am sure he will figure the game out before the teacher sniffs him out. He will get mad. Since we will have the evidence in hand, I welcome the discussion.
Meanwhile, I’m educating him on power plays. Examples come up all the time.
Going to a broader topic, the whole woke agenda looks like a panoply of power plays. People in power forcing the rest of us to do stupid, uncomfortable and dangerous things just because they have the power to do so. Masks would be the purest example of this, although there are certainly a vast number. Gene therapy “vaccines” also. Humiliating white people by forcing them to sit through DEI training and confess to a “racism” that they never felt or intended is certainly an exercise in power.
The claim that they are looking out for the planet, or some woebegotten group of victims, is often and perhaps usually a pretense for simply wanting to lord it over the rest of us. Witness what happens when the “saviors of humanity” get into power, be they Nazis, Bolsheviks, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Justin Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern.
Long ago I proposed that the epitaph on my tombstone should be “Did Not Take Shit Well.” Oksana calls me stubborn because I don’t put up with nonsense. What she fails to credit is that I try hard not to give people crap. I am willing to live and let live, but I expect the same. I hope to raise my kids the same way.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man continues to work on his review of “America’s Cultural Revolution.” Though it is not that great a book, and it timidly avoids some of the most essential topics, it does touch on most of the themes of my life. Including the above. More on the philanthropaths’ power plays tomorrow, then on to the review.
In my little family, we haver power plays too. One day, my daughter forgot something when she went to school so she phoned me to bring it down to her. We live on the fourth floor. Day two, it happened again, and I yelled at her. It hasn't happened again. We have an agreement. I do the washing. It's not very difficult. One day, she began to complain to me about the way I did the washing. I said, you are fully capable to going into the bathroom and doing the washing yourself, if you don't like the way I am doing it. I haven't heard another word about it. One day recently she complained about something that I did. My answer, "tough."
It's my feeling that women complain about household issues because it gives them power. If they complain, then they have caught us off guard. A good offense is the best defense. As long as you are fielding their complaints, you are not going to complain about them. Keep em guessing. Never let them get fully comfortable because then they might look at you and find you wanting. That's the strategy of women.
We had great success with sinus problems (stuffy nose issues) with a chiropractor who does cranio-sacral therapy. Our middle child (thanks to horrible allopathic medical interventions when he was young) constantly had a stuffed up nose that he was always trying to blow. After a couple of visits with the chiro, he blew his nose and said "I finally blew it out!" He adjusted his sinus cavity and has prevented a lifetime of constant blowing and sinus infections.