Lead, Follow, or Get the Hell Out of the Way!

Certain males, my grandfather used to say, “… wouldn’t make a pimple on a real man’s ass!” I've been thinking about that, and the men who today foist themselves upon the nation as "leaders." Arrrrrrrgh!

A few days ago, I heard again what seems to me will one day be the dirge played whenever the former United States of American is remembered.

“Real men cry . . .”

And, of course, it was a woman – or several – who said it. Well, today’s “male” does cry; he blubbers like a baby, matter of fact – and about things so damned adolescent and puerile those of us old enough to be his grandfather find hard to believe. Or stomach. Today’s “real” man does a lot of things men didn’t do before the feminist revolution that was in reality little more than an attack – a neurotic one - on maleness. And, of course, the testosterone and muscle that had built the world that made their new offensive possible, or even feasible.

Today’s man not only cries, he is as emotional as an spoiled brat – meaning, among other things, he beats the hell out of his wife (and kids) whenever he feels the need to let off steam (odd, isn’t it, how the same women who rail against “spousal abuse” are also the same women who insist that real men cry).

Today’s “real” man not only cries, emotes, beats his wife, and is cruel to the dog, he suck drugs, imagines that muscles made of steroids make him tough, cheats at every damned sport he plays, and gets his kicks watching scum-sucker crap like cock-fighting and dog-fighting. He swills beer while watching such manly sports as NASCAR and pro football and basketball, and stuffs his face until he weighs four hundred pounds, all the while parroting one-liners from the latest macho-minimalist movie he saw.

Confronted by the possibility of any of the violence he would appear to crave, he melts like chocolate in a skillet.

More, use a term larger than two syllables, he pouts and postures, acts as though his semi-literacy is some kind of social award or credential. He’s as stupid as an ox, but you should include him in any deliberation having to do with the literature, science, or military tactics he doesn’t know the first thing about. He knows his rights, but can’t distinguish the first amendment from the Communist Manifesto (which he doesn’t so much as recognize by title). His highest ideal seems to be Larry the Cable Guy. In the alternative, he’s a limp-wristed panty-waist, metrosexual “girly-man” who wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass.

Those or he’s a bloviating bullshitter like Fox News “line-up” of phony pundits, almost any of our pandering Senator Jack S. Phogbound (anybody remember Al Capp?) politicians, or their like. Oops – almost forgot our “celebrities?” Have you ever really looked at one of these wimps?” Jesus! – they're actors all right; poseurs is more it. And what they’re pretending to be is a MAN!

And if you think my having left out the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and dozens more who haven’t the substance of the shadows of men like the late Ed Bradley, Bill Cosby, and others their like, you’re wrong there, too. It’s just that people like Jackson and Sharpton so piss me off that I always break things before calming down.

Anyway, I hadn’t been so aware of the level to which masculinity had fallen in the general public until coming to South Texas. The astonishing rudeness of my male brethren . . . well, it astonished me. Men not only acted like boors – hats on while indoors; even at table while eating, forcing their way to the head of waiting lines, belching, farting, scratching and fifty things more obnoxious – they seemed to take a kind of perverse pride in it all. I’ve got a reputation back home, however, one for drawing a line in the sand.

A guy steps over that line when he puts his hands on me. Back when my youngest was eight or so, there was a John Wayne movie, the Shootist. Leaving the theater afterwards, Aaron said, “Hey, mom – that sounded like dad, huh?” He was referring to the line, “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on; I don’t do those things to other people, and I expect the same from them.” Several times (some of which are public record, by the way), a man availing himself of what appears to be some kind of social dispensation granted his Hispanic class and attempting to force his way into a waiting line reached out intending to shove me out of the way. That, when you think of it, is a pretty stupid thing to do when the “shove” is a two-time national champion in judo with more than a thousand organized fights on the record.

One example, excerpted in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, it’s worth reciting for what it says about the new “real” man of America.


“As a boy, I was taught behavior and manners I still exhibit and practice today. I will not permit a man to be rude to a woman, period . . . When a friend and I happened upon one macho character as he was pummeling a woman he held pressed helplessly against a car, I answered his, ‘Who the hell are you and what gives you the right to stick your nose in my affairs’ with something that may prove instructional here. ‘I'm the guy,’ I said, ‘who's gonna kick your ass and use it to sweep this parking lot if you hit that woman again. And, mister, my ‘right’ is the same right any decent man who sees you abuse a woman has.’

“My eyes holding his . . ., I fished a business card from my pocket and handed it to the woman. ‘Ma'am,’ I said, "if he hits or abuses you again - ever, you call me and it will be my distinct pleasure to make him very, very sorry.’ I didn't hear from them again, so I have no idea – but the bull-frog bastard deflated right before my eyes like a balloon. When we came out of the store we had been headed toward, the couple was still sitting in the car talking earnestly. As we walked behind their car to our truck, the woman put her arm out the car window and waved the card. My friend and I - the lady, too, it seems - had a little laugh at Tough Man's expense.

“I do have to confess to have mellowed somewhat (don't get the idea that I've stopped training to fight or shoot, though - that could lead to error with serious effect) in my old age. After the six (or seventh - I don't really make a big thing of this) similar incident, one in a local K-Mart, it occurred to me that my penchant for kicking bully's asses might label me with local police as a provocateur. In several instances, including that of the WalMart incident, the police were called. In that instance, a burly character who pushed an elderly man and his wife aside in order to force his way into line ahead of them at the checkout counter, my armlock happened to smash his face on the conveyor belt and spray blood from his broken nose around. When the old couple and the check-out lady had explained to arriving police officers what had occurred (did I forget to say that smart-ass had attempted to give me a hard shove?), I was not arrested.”


So much for the “war stories.” I hope they make a point (other than that I’m an irascible old character who also happens to love women).

I quote this all the time lately, but I’ll do it again – it’s the ineluctable truth:

“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.” -- John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty (1859)

A while ago, I posted on one of my pages here a list of questions. I said I would be adding to them as time went on. Here’s another, one asked in a recent book by Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler Corporation: Where have all the leaders gone?

There’s more: Where the hell is the public’s outrage at what the sorry pack of clueless bozos who are guiding our country to obvious catastrophic ruin? We have corporate gangsters stealing us blind, ruining the countryside, polluting and poisoning the atmosphere and environment, and making a mockery of our U.S. Constitution and law. This clusterf--- of clowns can’t so much as come to the effective aid of New Orleans after Katrina and Rita, but we let them run a war in Iraq! “Stay the course?!” With this FUBAR fraternity? You have GOT to be kidding!

In his book, Iacocca chides himself for being enraged. Well, by damn – at least I’m in good company there. The eighty-two year old stud also says something you’ve heard me say, too – if you know me or have read my “blogs.” He says that no one who isn’t outraged at what’s happening ought call himself a patriot. DAMNED RIGHT – I agree. The former CEO notes, as I have here, that the whole political “debate” has become a handy cop-out. Let me quote:

“And don’t tell me it’s all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That an intellectually lazy argument, and it’s part of the reason we’re in this stew. We’re not a nation of factions. We’re a people. We share common principles and ideals. We rise and fall together.”

When I say I couldn’t have said it better myself, I mean it – hell, it’s almost as if I DID say it!

I might add parenthetically that those who attempt apologist rationale regarding what I’ve just said are suspect of insanity in my view. There are so many proofs of federal corruption, incompetence, and contempt for the public that one could fill a volume, none more irrefutable than the fact that foreigners – even foreign governments – lobby in Washington, D.C. against the interests of the common citizen of the nation once the land of the free. No one not as corrupt as they are has any real hope of influencing the government that desecrates by its presence the city once graced by the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry. Even illegal aliens – thieves, rapists, pedophiles, and murderers – have the ear of government, an ear not accessible to the people who must pay for it all.

I’ll tell you something else, something historians will one day say: We have no leaders today because the society that would otherwise have produced them no longer exists.

“It’s okay for men to cry . . .” The fact is that the women saying that haven’t the faintest idea of what they speak. How many men do they know? Even their knowledge and familiarity with history is invariably so little that they have no real idea of what made its great men. The historical and sociological truth is that women have always had a major role in determining what a society and nation’s men are, because a man will always in some degree be whatever his woman demands. She is the prize in the great and eternal mating game, after all – what everything he strives for IS for. If a man can be a weakling and still have her, why would he strive for more?

Have another look, dear reader, at that quote from J. S. Mill.

I have some more questions, for the women who think real men cry, and the “real” men who do:

1. What happens to the self-esteem of a nation whose male leaders cry, whose leaders male and female practice the equivalent cowardice of lying? How do you get leaders from a society of men who blubber and weep? What happens to the spirit of self-reliance and independence that once defined us as a nation?

2. How have we brought down – ladies – the proud middle class male to a majority that this as impotent and feckless as what is now called the “little man?” You expect a George Washington, a Thomas Jefferson, an Abraham Lincoln, a George Patton, a Chester Nimitz, a Dwight Eisenhower, a Douglas MacArthur from “little men?”

3. Why are we no longer capable of raising our children to be real men? What are we doing to our boys? Why is it that these “real” men can do nothing – often, as a matter of fact, don’t even care about their children being mentally degraded, reduced to idiot consumers for the mere sake of consumption, their talent, creativity, and spirits inundated in the utter garbage being foisted upon them as food and drink, music, entertainment, sports – even sex. Why is it that “real” men seem powerless to do anything, either, about a nation so self-serving and conceited that they have become willing to feed their children poison, and let all the rest happen.

Were you paying no attention when feminism, the legislatures, and the courts exalted the “single-parent” family, making the male redundant, un-necessary, and without parental rights? I wasn’t. And my on the record prediction – pooh-poohed, of course by just about all the distaff side of society - concerning what would happen as a result is now daily news.

4. How is it that “real” men seem able to have no voice when it comes to responsible dissent? How can a nation continue as a democracy when its society has no real fear of or respect for genuine and honorable male anger? What government, what foreign enemy fears a nation of wimps?

5. Why would a nation of one hundred fifty million naturally powerful males, trained and educated in weapons and manly pursuits as males once were, feel it necessary to build billions and billions – hundreds of billions – of dollars worth of high-tech, push-button, and plush guns, tanks, bombs, planes, ships, submarines, rockets, and on and on – weapons all designed in the final analysis to somehow make a wimp a warrior? How is it that in Vietnam and wars since our “real” men, armed with every gee-whiz, Buck Rogers weapon the mind and science of man can devise, could not defeat an enemy essentially armed with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades?

Yeah, I know. The truth hurts. Dealing with it used to be a thing men did – no tears.

6. Why is a nation with all these “real” men so afraid? Why so depressed? Why so (fecklessly) angry?

7. Why do all these “real” men tolerate the veritable avalanche of hideous crime by government and government by the corporations? What kind of men have stood and still stand idly and passively by while corporate crime in America has reached, and now reaches even more staggeringly epidemic proportions; all while almost no criminal outrage is not tolerated by those pandering to the criminal corporations and their lobbyists in the Potomac capitol? What kind of men suffer under and tolerate a federal tax structure like ours, one that provides corporations like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and literally thousands more advantage - total ascendancy in the cases of the “Marts” – over struggling small businesses in the U.S.

And on and on, and on and on. “Real men.” Men who cry. You bet – instead of doing something, he can cry. That’ll fix it. Make him feel better. I have a lot more questions, but just one more, for today:

What kind of woman respects that kind of “man” . . . ?

Chaos, Priorities, and Things Ain't as Simple as You May Think...

Chaos, Priorities, and Things Ain't as Simple as You May Think..

A few days ago, Glen Beck’s CNN program discussed at detailed length Bible (and Book of Mormon, presumably) Prophecy having to do with the end of the world. The experts (why has that word come to make me flinch?) on the program, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, along with Joel Rosenberg, were agreed that Bible prophesy is being fulfilled and that the “end times” are near.

Last night Beck inveighed against the “Climate of Fear” being “fostered by the media” concerning global warning proponents. Evidently the “experts” will not have the sensational (hear the cash-registers and collection plates ring and tinkle, anyone?) Biblical version of the end of the world upstaged by anything so mundane – and deleterious of oil company profits - as global warming.

Anyone get the idea that what drives both these discussions is money – greed?

N-a-a-a-h! Shoot me for a cynic (and how cynical can you get?!)

Even more remarkable in its logical inconsistency regarding the question of fear- mongering was the tortured logic and twisted reasoning of the show’s host and his guests. Watching, you had also to wonder at the humanity – to say nothing of Christianity – of these loons. LaHaye fairly drooled at the prospect of his beloved text being vindicated. Just great if everyone dies, just so long as the Lord triumphs over all us wicked sinners. For a review of the drivel, here’s the URL

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/glenn.beck/

While I will use next time the Beck show and others (as I’ve promised) as grist for my mill concerning the abysmal state of thought process and reasoning in our benighted country, I have more important matters with which to deal today. I also addressed the subject of manners last time, and a couple of days before that, the selling of hate by the media. My e-mail has quadrupled, and I am being mentioned on other websites. Given thusly pause to consider more intently matters like these, together with the Beck Show and others like it, I’ve discovered what is almost certainly a factor in the miserable way the public of this country reasons. Some of you may even have recognized it yourselves.

That “factor” is just this: U.S. Citizens do not interrelate anything. Neither, of course – the corollary - do they prioritize. The result, as it were, is that “Americans” – from time to time, I remind us that there are thirty-four nations (note the prioritizing?) in this American hemisphere – continually start at around four of ten on a number line or scalar process. No one, in short, wants to be bothered with basics.

A few years ago, coaching athletes on the National Judo Team, I was at first amazed, then annoyed, at what I took to be their stubborn – even arrogant – refusal to study, even consider, gripping. Gripping power and skill is the sine quo non of judo, a grappling sport in which the players are fully clothed and all attacks and defenses depend upon a proper grip.

A year or so after the experience, I again encountered similar cerebral paresis in teaching police officers to prevent capture of their sidearms and shoot. When I asked officers how they trained their hands for handgun shooting, I received – invariably – an uncomprehending stare. The idea of hand strength contributing to shooting skill had never crossed their minds. It was astonishing for me to time and time again be confronted with an individual who had been practicing an endeavor for even decades, yet never realized or considered the importance of how strong his hands were to marksmanship.

Even more amazing perhaps is the fact that while I demonstrated again and again and again my ability to easily outgrip even national-class judo athletes one third my age, and to repeatedly and with ease relieve police officer students across the nation of their sidearm, no one undertook to follow my instruction.

An interesting – and instructional – sidelight to that last is the fact that several times during my the travail under harassment by police officers across the nation incited by IRS, I relieved several officers of their weapons; and when I had returned their equipment to them with the ammunition removed, the cops made no mention of the matter to superiors, other officers, or anyone else. It’s a guy thing, I presume.

There’s more. Yesterday, when I wrote about the critical importance of our society and nation’s loss of manners, I received one hundred, twenty-eight e-mail responses – even one phone call. Much of the response had to do with the fact that I spoke of male manners having to do with women, so let us start there – with a fundamental as critical to our future as is the loss of another seemingly small and unimportant thing, the honey bee.

The latter, you know, is responsible for as much as ninety percent of what we eat. Were they all to die, human beings by the millions would go hungry, many of them starve. “Little things,” as the song, “goes, mean a lot.”

Fundamentals you may have forgotten, or never learned:

First, perhaps foremost and as critical to survival on this planet as the bee, is the fact that the male human, like the female, has one purpose for having received the gift of life. That is to mate with her, then protect her and the child that results. The female has likewise but one use for Mother Nature, that of producing and nurturing a child. These things are fundamental, and they are facts, things incontrovertible by any religious, ideological, social, or other intuitive reasoning or response. More, all other human behavior is secondary and a responsive satellite.

Ignored or violated, as with any complex and chaotic system, it will seriously damage, even destroy, the species.

Oh, yeah – I can hear the empty heads being shaken. I’m very familiar with the sound – the judo grips and the shooting, remember? When, in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote her historically monumental book, “Silent Spring,” I remember hearing the same barbaric yawp from farmers then pouring insecticides and herbicides on their fields and into the water table from which they drank.

I heard the same brainless bloviating last night on the Beck show regarding air pollution and carbon dioxide being poured into the air these nitwits breathe. Can anyone doubt that “experts” like Beck, informed that there might be a den of rattlesnakes somewhere in their yard - or even house - would scoff, remark that there’ve always been rattlesnakes around there and say, “let’s see what happens – it’ll take too much time and effort to find out?” You can’t have the heuristic thought process much more FUBAR than that.

Let us return momentarily to my recent discussion of chaos and systems chaotic. It’s important to understand; more, anyone who thinks of matters like those being discussed here – even the importance of chivalry toward women – as trivial obviously does not understand chaos mathematics. First, to dispel an old, habitually intuitive idea, chaotic systems are not random. However random they may appear to be to the innumerate and uninformed among us, they are what is called “deterministic.” That means not only that they have something determining their behavior, but that they can to some degree be predicted.

Another way to say that is that one can expect that some very small force – try the honey bee – can cause horrendous result and damage.

Most critical to our discussion here is the fact that chaotic systems – and nature is a chaotic system – are sensitive, very sensitive, to the initial conditions. That, to say it another way, means that a very slight change in the starting point can lead to enormously different outcomes. To evince the essential nature of chaotic – to the intuitive “thinker” irrational of contradictory – systems, this makes them fairly unpredictable.

Finally, chaotic systems appear to be disorderly, even random. They’re not. In fact, mathematicians know that truly random systems are not chaotic; as a matter of fact – still another example of the confusion derived by intuitive thought on the mater - orderly systems predicted by classical mathematics, logic, and physics are the exceptions. In the world of ideologue, zealot, and chauvinistic patriot like Glen Beck, Sean Hannity – and, yes, Rose O’Donnell (I still can’t conceive of how a bubble head like that rises to her position of influence – god help us!) order, chaos rules!

The honey bee matter scares hell out of me; but it doesn’t scare me anywhere near like the Orwellian mindlessness of a nation that exalts by their patronage the stupefying stupidity of men and women like these. Now THAT is scary!

Almost as un-nerving is a nation of people who have yet to be taught about the “Birds and the Bees.” The society and nation had its sexual equivalent to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” back in the chaotic (yes, you bet I chose the term purposefully) sixties. Of fifty pages of bouffant babble one could chose for illustration, I offer this one:

http://www.hippy.com/article-311.html

There, you will find carefully reasoned, logical, and scientific pronouncements like this one: “Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.”

That was from a publication entitled “Redstockings (Bitch) Manifesto of 1969.” The term usually taken for an epithet when referring to the human female is quoted, not mine. If you notice a similarity in tone to the recent brouhahas having to do with Senator Barak Obama and Don (finally got his name straight) Imus, it’s merely because you’re not – quite – brain-dead, and you’ve been paying attention. This is not, suffice it to say, the stuff of implacable Spockian genius.

In fact, if you don’t recognize the tone and behavior of a spoiled brat, we need to include in our discussion the state of our children and the reason they, too behave like demented lunatics.

Gentle reader, there are no small things where things like nature, the weather, the ecosystem, or the role of male and female - chaotic systems - are concerned. My boy’s mother used to have a witticism, one of her own coinage (this was a very bright woman – hey, she married me, let’s not forget). “If she (or he) had a brain, she’d take it out and play with it!” I hope you get the point.

At the risk of redundancy, I also remember having written a short story while a sophomore in high school. In it, a big game hunter from Texas and the far future, went in a time machine back to the Cretaceous prehistoric period in order to hunt Tyrannosaurus Rex. Leaving, he was cautioned by his scientist employee not to kill anything but the Tyrannosaurus. The reptile, the scientist said, was extinct, so killing could affect nothing in the present time. Of course, when the hunter felled his prey, it toppled onto a butterfly, crushing and killing it; and when the Texan had returned to his own time, there was no life – none – here to greet him.

One of these days, under the urging of someone like Glen Beck or his ilk, we will kill the wrong butterfly, alter the wrong bead on the DNA chain, or take for granted one too many women. One thing is sure, that we will not upset any of the chaotic systems – and they are all interdependent, you know – with too much thought.