The "Ultimate Fighter," the Presidential Campaign, & a Nation on Steroid Nonsense

“In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale.” Anybody recognize Operation MOCKINGBIRD?

A few years ago, preparing a police science defensive tactics seminar during the time a few days after the first of the ”ultimate fighter,” “vale tudo,” mixed martial arts (have I missed anything?) contests, I readied myself, too, for the inevitable discussion of what certain of us insists on calling “streetfighting,” no rules (“vale tudo” means “everything goes”).

My answer is always the same, “There are always rules.” Seldom does anyone I say that to agree; in fact, that’s actually only happened once. Two guys agreed that time, strangely enough. One of the guys who agreed was named Kupferberg, and he was a mathematician specialized in game theory. The other was a guy with a doctorate in psychology.

I hasten, before I lose my audience to the fear of that terrible word “mathematics,” to point out that relatively seldom will anyone, even in warfare, do to his enemy what he wouldn’t want his enemy to do to him. That’s the reason potential belligerents have so often attempted to establish rules of warfare like the Geneva Convention. I also hasten to point out that those who ignore such conventions (of late, those include our own government), demonstrate incontrovertibly to their opponent a mental state admitting weakness, weakness of the kind that inevitably proves fatal.

Torture, for instance is the tactic and work of an abject coward, and/or one who knows he is at a disadvantage in opposing a stronger opponent likely to win (of course, one needs to be a fighter in order to know that, something none of those ordering or espousing torture by the U.S. is).

I could list pages of examples of rules, instinctive or socialized, observed by mankind. Even lower orders of animals, in fact, observe instinctively or otherwise rules having to do with survival of their kind. The macho minimalist warrior wannabe, however, is not interested in such niceties. Nowadays, he’ll tell you so. He’s stupidly proud of his infirmity, something he doesn’t realize betrays his puerile, effeminized nature to males who would otherwise be his peers.

That, besides, is beside the point. The point is this: First, game theorists know that all games are encapsulated, and therefore formed, by their rules. Rules, that is, determine what the game is and provide for and describe what is necessary for “winning” and “losing.” In some forms of personal or group combat, for instance, rendering the opponent incapable of further competition – whether it be loss of all his ability to compete in the form of tools, money, or logistics or the incapacity resulted from injury or death – is “winning.” It’s decided by rules, however, even when the rule is that of survival (trust me, there are many, many human beings who have not and do not consider mere survival a victory).

In the first several “ultimate fighter” tournaments, the outcomes – and what they taught – were conclusive proof of an old, old rule of the matter. From the ancient Greek Olympics and Roman Circus, grapplers all but always beat those who strike blows, whether with hands, feet, elbows, knees, or head. Predictably, the first of the latter day (this sort of thing has been done again and again, always with the same results) “ultimate fighter,” mixed martial arts contest resulted in victory for a grappler in a manner so unspectacular that within literally seconds of one fighter surrendering, an analyst “expert” was saying that neither of the contestants was doing anything effective or damaging to the other.

That wasn’t surprising to an old hand like me, either. Several times in my own experience, my opponent submitted and lost the fight without the official refereeing the match having noticed. Only when I released the armlock or strangle hold and the official was informed of the opponent’s surrender was the official – and spectator crowd – apprised of what had occurred. Neither was it possible for anyone, like me, who for more than fifty years actually competed on a judo or wrestling mat two or three times a week, to fail to recognize the ineffectiveness of strikes or blows as a weapon. Boxers, for instance, throw literally hundreds of punches without meaningful effect during any fight.

Interestingly enough, parenthetically, the “Brazilian Jujitsu” practioners of the “mixed martial arts” all but invariably employ grapping techniques long common to freestyle wrestling and to competitive judo in its classical and freestyle – Olympic – forms. The difference is, again, the rules, those of “Brazilian Jujitsu” being devised in a manner favoring and promoting groundwork whereas judo – the sport-art from which the former was devised – has rules favoring throwing. In fact, the rules of competitive judo now so favor throwing that victory by matwork – especially in the form of armlocks – is very difficult.

That’s further interesting, and illustrative of my point here, in that the armlock – especially in its “jujigatame” or crucifix form – is statistically easily the most efficient and effective combative maneuver known to man (don’t bother – I’ve been keeping statistics on the matter for no less than forty-five years.) In fact, I can’t help wondering (and while I’m shown clips of the major contests again and again by enthusiasts, I’ve never been to one of these affairs personally and seen only the original one in its entirety), if the new “ultimate fighter” rules – actual or tacit (socialized, I mean) – don’t hinder the “juji.” I suspect the latter, inasmuch as the contestants in the several clips I have seen perform the jujigatame crucifix armlock so poorly its effectiveness is reduced by more than sixty percent.

In fifty-six years, more than eleven hundred organized judo and wrestling contests, I’ve had an opponent escape my armlock exactly twice.

But as Bill Cosby says, “I told you all that so I could tell you this.” This isn’t about things as trivial as the “ultimate fighter;” not even about combative sports. This is about natural rules, and the way they govern human behavior. Further, it is about the often – almost invariably so – bizarre way man-made rules tend to be counter-productive and self-defeating. A game theorist tactician since boyhood, I first began to understand the mathematics of competition when I had begun intensive, in depth, investigation of news reporting. I realized, for instance and as I related in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” that man fears, avoids, and despises the truth. I quoted Immanuel Kant - “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made,” and H.G. Wells – “The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual into the social masonry.”

I found trying to understand – and, hence, get along with – my fellow man, while at the same time maintaining anything resembling freedom to me, almost impossible. As first, it was the reason I began to study personal – hand-to-hand combative science and art intensively. In that endeavor, mind you, I was interested only in what was most effective. Not entertaining, not sport – just effective. Broken teeth, broken noses, black eyes, and the like will do that for a kid.

One of the bewildering things then about man, you see, was – still is – the fact that among people so devoted to Christianity and its teachings, I was the not only the victim of beatings by bullies as often as three times a week, it was I to whom blame for the matter always accrued. Although I was beset by as many as four of my peers, all of whom outweighed my polio-ravaged and still recovering body, townspeople and parents always found a way to rationalize and intellectualize it all in such a fashion that the beatings were justified and/or excused.

Actually, when in 1977 my decades long mugging by the federal government had begun, I would observe ruefully that nothing had changed. In 1998, when a van operated by federal assassins had run me down as I crossed the street in a protected crosswalk, and I lay on the street literally fighting for my life against the continuing kicks and karate blows of my assailants, I thought the same as rush-hour traffic passersby strove resolutely to ignore what was happening.

Rules were being observed there, too.

But I digress. Suffice it to note that so fascinated was I with the mathematical aspects of the competition that is life on planet earth that I began what surely must have been the first attempt to quantify all of the factors therein. Forty years later, when I first learned that Colonel Trevor Dupuy and his Historical Evaluation and Research Organization (HERO) had identified and quantified for mathematical calculation and extrapolation seventy-three “combat variables,” I had done the same concerning personal combat. By not-so-great (in my opinion) co-incidence, I already assigned a CEV – Combat Effectiveness Value – to judo waza like ude hishigi jujigatame and ude hishigi hiza gatame in much the same manner as HERO had assigned CEV to tanks, guns, and military units.

But – although not without useful purpose - I digress again. Here, in a world and reality infinitely pregnant with the infinite probability of infinite perfection – paradise – human beings (homo sapiens - “thinking man”) go on making rules that forbid the very reasoning and thought that would otherwise make life for every one of us on planet earth a thing of joy. Incredibly – at least for one like me – instead of seeking ways to multiply the creative thought that will one day inevitably free us of the stupidity enslaving us, we make rules so inane, so driven by greed and concupiscence, that we almost invariably lose what we make rules in order to obtain.

“Democracy never lasts long . . .”

As a boy, by way of illustration, I learned eventually that grappling was the most effective way to fight. I used statistics and history – records – and scientific method. Experiment, both mental and actual. More, I learned from more of the same kind of mental experiment and actual competition that the most effective – hence, moral - reason for fighting was that of neutralizing the opponent or threat by restraining it - stop, in other words, what I couldn’t endure.

Most interesting to me as a boy learning what was necessary to rid myself of the hated affliction that was bullying of my peers was the scientifically incontrovertible fact that the most effective fighters pinned, armlocked, wristlocked, or leg-locked an opponent, rather than attempting to injure him with blows, kicks, head-butts, and the like. I realized, too, that an opponent who couldn’t grasp or strike me couldn’t hurt me (the reason that more recently – twenty-five years ago – I developed the “Twenty-One” system).

And, as I noted here a minute ago, the first of the “ultimate fighter” contests demonstrated the fact incontrovertibly. The grappler won easily (in fact, had Royce Gracie been practiced in the Twenty-One system and gripping, opponent Dan Severn wouldn’t have been able to deliver a single punch to his opponent’s head and face as Gracie defended from his “guard” position). But what happened?

Ah, but this isn’t about combative sports – not even the “ultimate fighter” kind, remember? But consider another state of affairs similar to the circumstances in which a kid recovering from poliomyelitis and seeking the means to free himself of bullying by his peers found himself, that of a nation faced with tyranny. Having come to the new world only a comparatively short time before, the people of this country desired freedom from the oppression into which governments heretofore had inevitably grown.

Determined to never again be beaten up, they formed a government governed by rules they believed would never be broken. Freedom was be-all and end-all of the constitution they wrote and ratified, and basically - like the “ultimate fighter” contests - there were to be few rules. The Founding Fathers of the United States also understood that rules encapsulate and dictate the form of the dual game that is the “vale tudo” fight of the individual against life. That applies to the citizen against his government, too.

The new government would therefore have few – very few - rules to wield against the peoples’ freedom.

But what happened?

Well, the “vale tudo,” no holds barred, street fight swiftly became a thing unrecognizable to any real, “no holds barred,” street fighter (me, for instance – and let’s not forget why I learned to be a fighter in the first place). You see, what the crowd wanted to see, and what the promoters (that’s the exploiter, money people) promoted, wasn’t actually what they proclaimed and professed to admire. Uh-uh. You see, really effective hand-to-hand fighting waza has little spectator appeal compared to the punches, kicks, head butts and pitifully ineffective tactics of “mixed martial arts.”

Punches, kick, head butts, and the like, while notoriously ineffective, are like the forward pass in football, the slam dunk in basketball, and the five hundred foot homerun in baseball. Fun to see for the ignorant and unknowledgeable, they are the soap opera and tabloid magazine of sports.

As with every other sport form of theater, commercialism inexorably took over so-called “mixed martial arts” competition. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” P.T. Barnum said. For reasons only sociologist, perhaps, could explain, no one asked the obvious questions. “Wait a minute, who ever saw a real, kill-or-be-killed, street fight between two guys wearing swim suits and wearing leatherized brass knuckles? “What really lethal fighter – like those our country and its C.I.A. once trained to kill without weapons – ever wasted time and risked mission failure with punches, kicks, head butts, and blows generally?”

But wait a minute – this is about government, and governments made “of the people, by the people, for the people.” That couldn’t happen to . . .

Couldn’t it? Well, what did happen? Why is the Land of the Free, the Nation of Laws, the Home of the Brave such that it would be unrecognizable to the men who created it? Why has it become the tawdry, meretricious weakling shadow of the mighty nation it once was? How could the figurative master streetfighter it once was have come to be the steroid-circus caricature of a real fight like the new “vale tudo” “ultimate fighter” of today’s supposed combative sports?

This was supposed to be nation of few laws, remember? The government was to have as little to do with the individual citizen as possible, remember? The government was to have little or no control over the genius, skill, initiative, and enterprise of the citizen, remember?

What happened?

The fact is that everything here demonstrates the fatal flaw in democracy (as John Adams said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that wasn’t a suicide.”). Few of the people who vote today – people who read the tabloids, patronize pro wrestling, the “ultimate fighter,” and the like - are bright enough to qualify to make important decisions in their own lives, let along those of others or the nation. As American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic of American life and culture H.L. Mencken observed, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” People will choose, and the formulators of “ultimate fighter” competition have exploited the fact, the tawdry, the sensationalistic, and the meretricious. They love spectacular phoniness.

The “Ultimate fighter,” rather than a competition of the best is a steroid freak show of in fact ridiculously ineffective fighters. The Land of the Free is an Orwellian caricature of its constitutional self, anything but free, with nearly everything a citizen can do “regulated.” Castrated by feminism, it cravenly seeks security and tranquility of servitude rather than the animating contest of freedom once demanded by its founders.

Now that I mention that quote, Mencken went on to say, “Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.” I guess that pretty much says it all for the current presidential election campaign, what?

Wrap it up, Hal – this is too long already. Suffice it to say that anyone who observes the vicissitudes of combative sports in the Land of the Fee should not be surprised at what politics and government here have become. And there, finally, is the rule of life and nature we “honor more in the breach than the observance.” Having handed over supervision of our nation and its government to youth who will not listen to their elders, youth too callow and easily duped to avoid exploitation by the same venal capitalist forces that rule all forms of sport in the U.S., we have violated the most fundamental rule in the game of life.

Take it from a guy with more time on judo and wrestling mats than today’s “ultimate fighter” has lived.

P.S. Two more quotes from Mencken (recognize anything today?):

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.”

Wake up, “America” – or be John Adams’ “suicide.”