Posted on 12/14/2011 8:50:39 PM PST by Little Ray
Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. The fact that anyone listened to such a numskull is a symptom, not the cause, of a culture in decline. The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality. The great banker-journalist (and founder of the original National Review) Walter Bagehot said it well almost 150 years ago:
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences. Many civilizations have come to the state of devolution represented by modern Berkeley folkways, from wife-swapping to vegetarianism. These ideas don’t come from a hardscrabble existence in contact with nature’s elemental forces; they are the inevitable consequence of being an effete urban twit removed from meaningful contact with reality. The over-civilized will try to portray their decadence as something “highly evolved” and worthy of emulation because it can only exist in the hothouse of highly civilized urban centers, much like influenza epidemics. Somehow these twittering blockheads missed out on what the word “evolution” means. Evolution involves brutal and often violent natural selection, and these people have not been exposed to brutal evolutionary forces any more than a typical urban poodle.
Through human history, vigorous civilizations had various ways of dealing with the unfortunate human tendency toward being a weak ninny. The South Koreans (for my money, the hardest men in Asia today) have brutally tough military training as a rite of passage. I’ve been told that the Soviet system had students picking potatoes during national holidays. The ancient Greeks used competitive sports and constant warfare. The Anglo-American working classes, the last large virtuous group of people left in these countries, use bullying, violent sports, fisticuffs, and hard living.
I think there is a certain worldview that comes from violent experience. It’s something like…manhood. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest badass to be a man, but you have to be willing to throw down when the time is right.
A man who has been in a fight or played violent sports has experienced more of life and manhood than a man who hasn’t. Fisticuffs, wrestling matches, knife fights, violent sport, duels with baseball bats, facing down guns, or getting crushed in the football field—men who have had these experiences are different from men who have not. Men who have trained for or experienced such encounters know about bravery and mental fortitude from firsthand experience. Men who have been tested physically know that inequality is a physical fact. Men who know how to deal out violence know that radical feminism’s tenets—that women and men are equal—are a lie. We know that women are not the same as men: not physically, mentally, or in terms of moral character.
Men who have fought know how difficult it is to stand against the crowd and that civilization is fragile and important. A man who has experienced violence knows that, at its core, civilization is an agreement between men to behave well. That agreement can be broken at any moment; it’s part of manhood to be ready when it is. Men who have been in fights know about something that is rarely spoken of without snickering these days: honor. Men who have been in fights know that, on some level, words are just words: At some point, words must be backed up by deeds.
Above all, men who have been in fights know that there is nothing good or noble about being a victim. This is a concept the modern “conservative movement,” mostly run by wimps, has lost, probably irrevocably. They’re forever tugging at my heartstrings, from No Child Left Behind to Israel’s plight to MLK’s wonders to whining that the media doesn’t play fair to the overwrought emotional appeals they use to justify dropping bombs on Muslims. The Republicans are even taking seriously a pure victim-candidate: Michelle Bachman. As far as can be told, she’s a middle-American Barack Obama with boobs and a slightly loopier world view.
Modern “civilized” males don’t get in fistfights. They don’t play violent sports. They play video games and, at best, watch TV sports. Modern males are physical and emotional weaklings. The ideal male isn’t John Wayne or James Bond or Jimmy Stewart anymore. It’s some crying tit that goes to a therapist, a sort of agreeable lesbian with a dick who calls the police (whom he hates in theory) when there is trouble. The ideal modern male is the British shrimp who handed his pants over to the looter in south London.
How did we get here? Estrogens in the food supply? Cultural Marxism’s corrosive influence? Small families? Some of the greatest badasses I’ve known had many brothers to fight with growing up. When good men who will fight are all extinct, there is no more civilization. No lantern-jawed viragos are going to save you from the barbarian hordes. No mincing nancy boys with Harvard diplomas will stand up for the common decencies: They’re a social construct, dontcha know. The conservative movement won’t save you: They’re chicken-hearted careerists petrified of offending a victim group.
Teddy Roosevelt, my ideal President, kept a lion and a bear as pets in the White House and took his daily exercise doing jiu-jitsu and boxing. He even lost vision in an eye in a friendly boxing match while he was president. Our last three glorious leaders are men who kept fluffy dogs and went jogging. I don’t trust squirrelly girly-men in any context. When confronted with difficult decisions, they don’t do what’s right or tell the truth—they’ll do what’s easy or politically expedient. Unlike the last three, Teddy Roosevelt never sent men to die in pointless wars, though he was more than happy to go himself or risk his neck wrestling with bears.
I’m no great shakes: I’m a shrimpy egghead in a suit who thinks about math all day. I don’t train for fighting anymore, and my experiences with violence are fairly limited. Nonetheless, I judge people on these sorts of things. When I first meet a man, I don’t care what kind of sheepskins or awards he has on his walls. I don’t care if he is liberal or conservative. I want to know if they have my back in a fight. That’s really the only thing that matters.
Well, I’m not a man but I’ve been punched in the face more than once. Once by a man, it was very sad because he and his wife, children and even grandchildren were completely ostrasized afterwards in our small town. One year my husband bought the granddaughter’s 4H lamb as a way of saying “Get over it, we have”. He knew it would get attention because no one would ever bid on her animals and the Buyers Club alway bought them at the starting price. It was very sad because she cried when she thanked him and told him that she knew no one would buy her animals because of her grandparents.
The one I’m proud of was breaking up a fight with 3 women beating up one woman and no one would do anything but watch. (I remember thinking WTF too.) One was on top of her and the other two were kicking her and pulling her hair, it was awful. I went and grabbed the woman on top of her and pulled her off and then her SIL attacked me. She was a big old girl and I weighed 100 lbs tops and the only reason she didn’t obliterate me is I got her in a bear hug and grabbed her hair underneath where it really hurts until my husband came to rescue me. I was shaking in my shoes but I acted tough.
The woman was badly injured and they were afraid she was going to be blind but she recovered and her whole family thought I was her hero. I remember being afraid to talk to the police because I had said some obcenities, LOL, I was young and naive then.
What did he fly, the F-4? F-104?
Here’s the problem living in today’s world.
You can’t look cockeyed at someone before your 2A rights are taken away. Idiotic zero-tolerance policies and now misdemeanors that you get get by shouting at someone can grab your gun rights from under you.
You don’t want to get a record of fighting. THey make examples out of good people that fight for good reasons. The asshole criminals that fight don’t care and they have civil rights groups that care about reducing their sentences. Joe Citizen gets the shaft.
F-104.
The F-4 wasn’t a particularly dangerous aircraft, being big, heavy, and with lots of wing. The ‘104 on the other hand was an engine with a seat strapped to the front and some extra sheetmetal on the sides to make it look like it had wings. I think even Yeagar was scared to fly it, and he lost the ends of two fingers on one of his altitude record flights in one.
First time I heard him read a speech -- (it was back in 2004 I think) -- my overarching thought was, "Whoa -- this guy's a bit light in the loafers. PC Dems are gonna love him"
What an idiotic statement. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good bar fight as long as I’m bigger and badder than the other guy, but that doesn’t make me smarter. What makes me smarter is stopping fights.
If my idiot brother deliberately spills the beer of a 300 pound bald headed guy sitting at a table all by himself because the guy looks evil, I’ll buy the guy another picture of beer. If my kids, in their 30s, are near blows, I’ll stand between them. One of my kids went to Iraq and was in Force Recon, the other is a natural born fighter.
I was so impressed with Bush’s restraint when he started the Iraq war, how he knew the French, Russians and the United Nations were making money off of the boycott. Yet Bush had the restraint to let it slide. That is leadership.
This must be a myth foisted upon a trusting citizenry by the Tea Party or extreme right wingers.
Fortunately, we now have PETA, who would never allow such barbarity and animal abuse in the White House.
Today, the ACLU would probably sue LBJ for picking up his hounds by the ears. And win. Noble animal rights advocates, ya know.
Bump! My first fight made me a little man instead of a wimp. My last fight... Well, not so much. But hey, I got home OK!
It forms good advice. One doesn't have to be the toughest person, one simply has to be tough enough to hurt ones opponent even if one loses. It's a good way to keep things from coming to a boil if the bully knows he's going to get hurt even if he wins. I also have a degree in literature but bookish men who have never had to successfully sweat their way through three rounds know a bit less about much of classical literature than I do no matter what degree they hold.
Thank you for posting this excellent article. I couldn’t agree more. This article articulates nicely I’ve been observing for a long time (here in Northern California), surrounded by the “civilized” metrosexuals who would be scared to touch an unloaded gun and wouldn’t know what to do with one with a round or a mag... and who would try to hide behind me or run before they’d defend me from some threatening thug.
It also may explain the seemingly illogical attraction to the bad boys instead of the “nice” guys, because a lot of the good guys are 100% wimped out like this article describes and a lot of the bad boys still have some b*lls. Not to go to absolutes; just my observation.
So for the current crop of candidates? With the possible exception of Mitt, they all have more b*lls than 0bama.
Scary about that cop - glad there are men like you out there though! In case that young man didn’t get a chance to thank you, Thank You for doing the right thing.
I hate how things have degraded to the point where proven sick perverts & thugs (Phil Garrido, Larry Singleton & the rapper Tupac and Tookie whatever-his-last-name-was but I doubt he’s resting in any peace immediately come to mind) get released or somehow post-humously sainted. It’s hard to know that the first two got 100% convicted and put behind bars (even though the $0.22 solution would be way more respectful to all involved) AND THEN RELEASED! That is insane!!!
I once heard Tupac described as a “slain civil rights leader” and I’m like, “Dude, wasn’t he a convicted rapist thug gang-banger?!?”
In order to fight successfully you have to be able to fight hurt. There is only ONE way to learn to fight hurt...
” I was shaking in my shoes but I acted tough.”
Moving forward while shaking in your shoes is BEING tough. It scares the crap out of the people presently in charge of things.
But “real men” are not afraid of putting their wellbeing on the line when it counts.
Yep. Teddy led the way to Wilson, who got us to FDR, who got us LBJ. Between the Social Security from FDR, and Medicaid/Medicare/”War on Poverty” made sure the country would eventually go bankrupt.
But if I have to have Regressive leading the country, I’d rather have a TR than an Obama.
That is truly an inspired statement... But then C. S. Lewis was an inspired man.
I don't know why he'd say anything nice about the Muzzies. They hide behind their noncombatants to avoid annihilation.
I thought it was the F-102 and F-106, the Convair Deltas.
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