3-14-06 Yin - Yang
The political landscape of America has lately been a subliminal matter of too much yang.
George W. Bush has managed to focus his public image and PR into a truly archetypal niche, one that's not all that easy to get a handle on when there are so many specific things that go down bearing the public's attention, scattering it across so many issues... At the bottom of all this, however, has been the capturing the yang flag.
This is hardly a matter of the battle of the sexes, men versus women, but rather the more fundamental masculine and feminine, active and passive elements.
Dubya is the manly man, and he won't back down. He holds that position with a hard stance. He won't budge. He's gonna bring the battle to the enemy. It's truly the most basic thing about him. Hard, dry, active, unyielding, and manly.
This stance makes it a cinch to polarize people into either the yin or yang camp. It's a very polarizing phenomenon. You're either accepting of a leader that's very yang, or not.
Meanwhile, capturing the yang flag leaves the political opposition with no other choice but to carry the yin flag. Soft, wet, yielding, and passive.
It makes the Hillary Clinton alternative purely an archetypal choice. You either want the yin camp, or you don't. And it will be very difficult to imagine "soft, wet, yielding, and passive" leading the country in the "global war on terror". Consequently, Hillary will have to capture the yang flag, in order to win. That will be something to watch...
The last election campaign was waged on those terms. Kerry was the "soft" candidate, the "waffling" candidate, the "complex" candidate. It was very difficult to figure out what he stood for. You didn't have any trouble with Bush, however, because you really had a solid idea of where he stood. He stood hard and firm. There wasn't anything else to it. He was the "hard" candidate, the "simple" candidate.
Now, according to Kinsey anyway, people aren't always all yin or all yang. There are a few gradations in between. See the Kinsey scale at...
http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/ak-hhscale.html
This manner of classifying the yin-ness of a woman or the yang-ness of a man on purely sexual terms is, of course, still considered controversial, but it tends to lend a hand in understanding the nature of what's been happening to the American culture and the political landscape in this country over the past five years. It's even a Bushist tendency to not be tolerant of these gradations. One is either a manly man or a womanly woman in the imaginary universe that Dubya lives in.
Bush's image and PR appeals on a gut level with his elementary swagger, his manly man certainty, his yang-ness. The only yin hint about him is that little head-bobbing thing he does when he's trying to make a point. Even that's the kind of thing you'd expect to see from a manly man who's trying to explain a more difficult concept, ie- it almost verges on being embarrassing to have to get so deeply involved with explaining anything. Simplicity is yang, it's a manly trait. Complexity is yin. So we get that little head-bobbing thing whenever he's compelled to spill over into that more yin quality of explaining a complex idea. He acts a little nervous about it. He puts that nervous little grin on his face. It is, of course, very manly behavior to appear this way when attempting to explain a complex thing. But the longer he has to bob his head and explain anything complex, the higher his voice registers...
He's got it down to a science...
Meanwhile, the country has been polarized quite severely by this. There has been, as a result, a tendency for people to individuate from either the yang-ness of the Bush administration, or the yin-ness of the democratic party's default assignation in this clever little trick. It doesn't matter where you might be on the Kinsey scale, or whether you're a man or a woman. It's the archetypal nature of this underlying scenario that unconsciously persuades people, one way or the other.
No real discourse takes place across this divide.
The way for this ridiculous situation to get unglued from the political landscape is to get the balance between yin and yang back into order. It probably doesn't really matter whether a yin predominance develops or the current yang predominance continues. Either way, it's sadly out of balance within our current government.
George W. Bush has managed to focus his public image and PR into a truly archetypal niche, one that's not all that easy to get a handle on when there are so many specific things that go down bearing the public's attention, scattering it across so many issues... At the bottom of all this, however, has been the capturing the yang flag.
This is hardly a matter of the battle of the sexes, men versus women, but rather the more fundamental masculine and feminine, active and passive elements.
Dubya is the manly man, and he won't back down. He holds that position with a hard stance. He won't budge. He's gonna bring the battle to the enemy. It's truly the most basic thing about him. Hard, dry, active, unyielding, and manly.
This stance makes it a cinch to polarize people into either the yin or yang camp. It's a very polarizing phenomenon. You're either accepting of a leader that's very yang, or not.
Meanwhile, capturing the yang flag leaves the political opposition with no other choice but to carry the yin flag. Soft, wet, yielding, and passive.
It makes the Hillary Clinton alternative purely an archetypal choice. You either want the yin camp, or you don't. And it will be very difficult to imagine "soft, wet, yielding, and passive" leading the country in the "global war on terror". Consequently, Hillary will have to capture the yang flag, in order to win. That will be something to watch...
The last election campaign was waged on those terms. Kerry was the "soft" candidate, the "waffling" candidate, the "complex" candidate. It was very difficult to figure out what he stood for. You didn't have any trouble with Bush, however, because you really had a solid idea of where he stood. He stood hard and firm. There wasn't anything else to it. He was the "hard" candidate, the "simple" candidate.
Now, according to Kinsey anyway, people aren't always all yin or all yang. There are a few gradations in between. See the Kinsey scale at...
http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/ak-hhscale.html
This manner of classifying the yin-ness of a woman or the yang-ness of a man on purely sexual terms is, of course, still considered controversial, but it tends to lend a hand in understanding the nature of what's been happening to the American culture and the political landscape in this country over the past five years. It's even a Bushist tendency to not be tolerant of these gradations. One is either a manly man or a womanly woman in the imaginary universe that Dubya lives in.
Bush's image and PR appeals on a gut level with his elementary swagger, his manly man certainty, his yang-ness. The only yin hint about him is that little head-bobbing thing he does when he's trying to make a point. Even that's the kind of thing you'd expect to see from a manly man who's trying to explain a more difficult concept, ie- it almost verges on being embarrassing to have to get so deeply involved with explaining anything. Simplicity is yang, it's a manly trait. Complexity is yin. So we get that little head-bobbing thing whenever he's compelled to spill over into that more yin quality of explaining a complex idea. He acts a little nervous about it. He puts that nervous little grin on his face. It is, of course, very manly behavior to appear this way when attempting to explain a complex thing. But the longer he has to bob his head and explain anything complex, the higher his voice registers...
He's got it down to a science...
Meanwhile, the country has been polarized quite severely by this. There has been, as a result, a tendency for people to individuate from either the yang-ness of the Bush administration, or the yin-ness of the democratic party's default assignation in this clever little trick. It doesn't matter where you might be on the Kinsey scale, or whether you're a man or a woman. It's the archetypal nature of this underlying scenario that unconsciously persuades people, one way or the other.
No real discourse takes place across this divide.
The way for this ridiculous situation to get unglued from the political landscape is to get the balance between yin and yang back into order. It probably doesn't really matter whether a yin predominance develops or the current yang predominance continues. Either way, it's sadly out of balance within our current government.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 5:41 PM
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