The U.S. Male - These Days, Not So Much a Boy Scout

Politics and politicians, and the god-awful mess they’ve made of my country, have me so angry, so pissed off and disgusted, that I have to write about something else. Besides, politics and politicians are what we have let them become – and I’m part of the “we.” We deserve what we’re getting – including high gas prices (pushing the accelerator down, you know, creates demand and raises the damned price). I haven’t been part of the problem, including that last, for at least three decades, but with me, things just aren’t other people’s fault, and I should have done something. I should have done more.

Now we’re in a helluva mess. Something. I should have done something.

And I have to do something now. Our kids are going to grow up in a maelstrom of Hobbes-ian social and societal horror – “continual fear of violent death; and life… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Hobbes - and there doesn’t seem to be a damned thing I can do about it. But I have to – I have to!

I don’t pray, implying as it does that god can be lobbied and is therefore as evil and unjust as any of today’s pandering politicians. In fact, to pray as we do today, much the manner with which we petition government, is to me blasphemous. But I know, too, that good deeds and the love of fellow man they demonstrate are obedience to god’s prime directive for man. If there are honest prayers, and praise to god, then they must be chivalry and loving conduct. That’s what I’ll do. Even knowing that all, probably, that I will really accomplish is balm for my own conscience, that is what I will do.

The thing is, though, that I’ve been a knight errant since I was a boy. From the day that I first used my extraordinary ability to cope with the elements and nature (Indians back home dubbed me “Walks-in-Storms”) to rescue a very pregnant women from an Iowa snowbank, and was awarded her grateful hug and kiss on the cheek, I could do nothing else. That hug and kiss, the gratitude in her eyes when I had carried her to the snowplow I had summoned from a nearby farmhouse for her trip to the hospital, addicted me to what is certainly the most powerful drug there is.

So. Let us sit down and reason together for a moment. A while back, seized by another fit like this one, I authored an “Etiquette and Manners” page on my website. Born like this essay out of disgust, what I said that day was due my having observed a number of today’s pitiful excuses for the human male behaving in the manner of the miserable surrogate he is. My remarks then observed that much of our present woes can be attributable to the mess feminism and male weakness derived from loss of contact with real men feminism fomented and demanded have made of the “U.S. male.”

Like the postal version of the word, male has come to mean higher and higher cost for less and less purpose.

I couldn’t help note at the time of 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, and additionally, that society’s damnable misbehavior in the presence of the Stars and Stripes seems for some reason to parallel the abysmal conduct of men toward our women. I’m pretty sure the two examples of masculine weakness are part of and have the same origins. There are those who will remember my having quoted J.S. Mill at the time, and I’ll do it again here. Writing in his essay entitled “On Liberty,” the great man said, “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

I noted, too, that anyone who didn’t recognize today the state Mill spoke of must be sleep-walking, semi-comatose.

But enough of repetition; well, not quite – I also remarked that men so soft, so comfortable and surfeited on the seeming supportive plenty of today’s largely illusory society as to forget their primal role in creation, that of husband to a woman and her child, could hardly be expected to respect the flag of the nation they are also charged with husbanding.

Oh, I can hear the protests from men. I answer with a story from my boyhood, that of the townswoman then who frequented the town’s taverns with her husband. Hearing something I said, or the way I said it, regarding the woman, my grandfather seized my arm in that vise-like grip of his. “You listen,” he said in that scarily quiet tone of his when annoyed, “a woman, any woman, is a lady as far as you are concerned. Always! That doesn’t have anything to do, mind you, with the truth of what the woman is, it has to do with what you are. Don’t you ever forget that.”

I haven’t. That was long ago, of course, but all of my experience since then has made it clear that one’s behavior toward anything must not be derived from the worth of the object, but from his behavior as derived from his evaluation of himself. A man behaves – and treats others – according to his own estimation of what – not who - he is. Men who know themselves to be capable of great things not only dare great things, but dare to become knights errant, samurai, servants of their fellows; men who know themselves to be weaklings think only of themselves. That, you see, is the most worrisome thing to them, the thing most dangerous, the thing most likely to let them down. That simple.

There have been notable exceptions, but I have seldom seen a blustering and bullying male, the kind who inflicts himself on those around him by flaunting his execrable conduct and manner, who didn’t turn in to a sniveling coward when confronted. That or run to a cop or lawyer – for today’s male, the equivalent of “mommy.”

And it is a fact of nature and behavior that one becomes what he does. Ruled by his mind, the individual can become almost anything (in fact, more’s the pity, that’s true of good and bad); more, my life has taught me enormous faith in the power of one determined individual. “One man with courage,” Thomas Jefferson observed, “is a majority.” It’s also true, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed, "… that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

After that experience with the pregnant lady in an Iowa snowbank (I probably tell that story too often, but it was one of the most wondrous things that has ever happened to me) I determined that henceforward I would never leave anywhere I had gone until I had made certain that it was a better place for my having been there. I would never leave another person without having made the effort to assure that they would never fail to remember with pleasure my having been there. I have forgotten that pledge to myself seldom – like I said, it’s an obsessing addiction. So obsessed did I become that I would develop a certain skill with people, especially women (I suppose it’s just far more fun with the opposite sex, for some reason); and, as I related in the book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, it would all one day make me very powerful.

Powerful? Yes, so powerful that I would successfully stand up to the most powerful government in the history of mankind. I had, you see, by then acquired so many friends that I was impervious to everything the government of a capitalist dictatorship customarily does. I could not, for instance, be impoverished, or forced to steal or rob. Everywhere I went, and I could go anywhere I chose despite everything government could do, I found people eager to repay with largesse “a hundred-fold, shaken together and trodden down” even the simplest and smallest of kindnesses I had once given them.

Goodness like small courtesies magnify in the mind of him to which they are done hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times. Offer a man in trouble a hand, he will often offer you his life, later – when you are in trouble. Offer a lady your hand, or arm, she may well offer you her heart, and there are few things in this universe as constant as the loyalty of a woman who loves.

And if you don’t believe that, you merely give yourself away to one who has learned it the only way it can be learned.

So what I mean to do for my benighted country today is offer a lesson once taught me. I have already said here that we really do not need government; and we need nothing governments have ever done for the people they imagine that they rule. That, of course, is provided that we have one another as I once had literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of friends. We “have” one another when we do as I have done – never go anywhere without being certain that the place and the people are better for our having been there.

But it all depends, as all human society always has, upon good men. “Good” is not hard to define, when it comes to men. Good is the quality of being above price except when paid in the coin of love, honor, and respect.

Does anybody remember, “love, honor, and obey?” Does anybody remember what it meant? No, I don’t suppose; an ideology known as feminism buried it under an avalanche of militant propagandist falsehood. More, the rise of militant feminism has paralleled without deviation the nation’s decline, something absolutely undeniable. We are in the death spiral where we find ourselves because of a lack of will characteristic of female dominated democracies.

We have followed the path observed by ancient Greece philosopher Plato. “Male republics give way to female democracies, and democracies give way to dictatorships.” You tell me what you see in our latter day history.

We must restore our nation’s maleness. We must begin teaching our male children to be men. We must teach our little girls what a man is. These are not mere platitudes! They are, in fact, societal atoms that everything social and national are made of. They are absolutely critical, and failure means doom. Like most things so monumental in decisive import, it is a simple matter, but far, far from easy. It is as simple as the once-famous Boy Scout Oath so many of the nation’s men learned as boys. A scout, the oath says, has standards, rules to which by which he measures himself and is measured, and these rules are as difficult as making the nation slow its highway driving speeds in order to drive down the cost of energy, or prevailing upon the obese sixty-seven percent of us to lose weight meaningfully.

It is as difficult as taking back control of our government by total repudiation of elections, or by the rise of a political party totally independent of corporate influence and that of lobbyist. It can’t, in fact, all be done in one great effort. WE don’t have anything like the men that would require.

But it can be done. In the famed writing of a samurai of ancient Japan, the Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi speaks of a tactic he calls “Breaking the Corners.” A little at a time, the impossible opponent is weakened. Sometimes called “the death of a thousand cuts,” it can bring down a colossus – or a government. It can change a society. In fact, as Margaret Mead observed, “it is the only thing that ever has.”

We need to start now, and we need to start with our children. There is nothing they need more than role models, heroes and idols who are worthy of being emulated. We need to begin teaching our youth right – double meaning intended. We need to teach them what has traditionally and academically been called a life view. It happens that I grew up among people who had the only life view that nature and nature’s god will any longer tolerate. I dare say that because I can demonstrate by means of history and logic that we are now in the grip of evolutionary forces, such that we learn to treat nature and nature’s god with respect much in the manner that we need to learn to treat and respect one another, or we bring down upon our own heads cataclysm.

What, specifically and devoid of the politicians’ oblique and evasive rhetoric, does that mean? I set myself a daunting task there, but among the farmers of Northeast Iowa, boys were reared in an ethic almost exactly that of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, the ideal that all other persons were seen and treated as equals. “It isn’t about the other person,” Opa said, “it’s about you!” That idea was rooted in another, that earning enough to be comfortable and provide for all the needs of family was the proper and moral goal of good men, and that anything more was excessive and depriving of others.

Compare that to the ethics of today’s capitalist. While you’re at it, try to find anything of the Boy Scout Promise in the behavior of Congress these days – the immigration issue, for instance, or the war in Iraq. Those people, those men – I demand nothing of women here, save the obvious – are what they are or are not because of what they were or were not as children. They were taught. Just as children must be taught racism, sexism, and what have you – they are not natural, you know – they must be taught greed, power-madness, and all rest of that Congress and the weakling in the White House now inflict upon us.

And a child will be taught, by someone or something. There is no escaping that, either. The questions that remain are who will teach him? And what? I suggest this: “On my honor (are you aware that school children can no longer define that word?), I will do my best to do my duty to god and my country and to obey the Scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

The Scout Oath is followed by the Scout Law. It’s worth reading. “A scout,” says the law, “is”:

TRUSTWORTHY
A Scout tells the truth. He keeps his promises. Honesty is part of his code of conduct. People can depend on him.
LOYAL
A Scout is true to his family, Scout leaders, friends, school, and nation.
HELPFUL
A Scout is concerned about other people. He does things willingly for others without pay or reward.
FRIENDLY
A Scout is a friend to all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He seeks to understand others. He respects those with ideas and customs other than his own.
COURTEOUS
A Scout is polite to everyone regardless of age or position. He knows good manners make it easier for people to get along together.
KIND
A Scout understands there is strength in being gentle. He treats others as he wants to be treated. He does not hurt or kill harmless things without reason.
OBEDIENT
A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them.
CHEERFUL
A Scout looks for the bright side of things. He cheerfully does tasks that come his way. He tries to make others happy.
THRIFTY
A Scout works to pay his way and to help others. He saves for unforeseen needs. He protects and conserves natural resources. He carefully uses time and property.
BRAVE
A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him.
CLEAN
A Scout keeps his body and mind fit and clean. He goes around with those who believe in living by these same ideals. He helps keep his home and community clean.
REVERENT
A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.

The motto of a scout and the man he becomes is Be Prepared, and his slogan you may recognize from something I said here at the outset. “Do a good turn daily.”

There came a time not too many years ago, just about the same time as Helen Reddy sang her song, “I am woman, hear me roar,” that to “be a good scout” was a “put-down” - an expression of derision. It was the time of the anti-hero male, the guy who pisses me off almost daily with his bullyingly boorish behavior, the same guy who snivels like a boyish brat when confronted with real strength. The ladies of the feminist movement wanted their “sensitive man, a man who can cry without shame” (remember it all? - I do) – in order, of course, that the male should reveal no greater control of his emotions than they – and they got him.

He is everywhere these days, and he behaves exactly as a spoiled child once did, resembles nothing so much as a two hundred pound baby. Tell me, why are we surprised that our nation resembles and behaves likewise?

Fine. We either return to the time when men were proud of being a “Boy Scout,” or we go on to the time Hobbes spoke of, the time when men would live in “continual fear of violent death; and life…” Life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”