Posted on 05/13/2002 5:13:08 AM PDT by Starmaker
Luke Helder knows the first rule about Fight Club – don't talk about Fight Club. While Helder has not acknowledged drawing any inspiration from the 1999 movie Fight Club, circumstantial evidence points in that direction.
Helder has confessed that his goal was to create an explosive pattern of destruction with his pipe bombs, namely the pattern of a "smiley face" on the map of the United States. The smiley face is the same pattern is used in Fight Club when Brad Pitt's legion of anarchical terrorists commence Operation Mayhem, a series of terrorists attacks designed to topple modern American society. If Luke Helder is copycatting his own version of Operation Mayhem, then what at first glance seemed to be a senseless spree of violence by an unlikely perpetrator slowly begins to make sense.
The story of Fight Club revolves around an unnamed narrator (portrayed by Edward Norton) and tracks his transformation from a milquetoast, cubicle-bound, 98-pound weakling into a steel-willed Nietzschean übermensch. This rebirth is brought about through his association with Pitt's character Tyler Durden.
Durden reveals the secret frustration behind the nihilistic frenzy he has fomented when reminding the men, "We've all been raised on television to believe we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact and we're very, very [ticked] off."
The missing value system in the lives of these men Durden attributes to poor male role models: "Your father was your model for G-d. And if your father bails out, what does that tell you about G-d?" He further elaborates on the possibility that "G-d doesn't like you" but that "His hate is better than His indifference."
Aside from a missing father and a hostile G-d, Durden laments that the men are a "generation of men raised by women."
So all this means that Luke Helder is a mixed-up kid in a movie-fueled fantasy world à la John Hinckley and his Taxi Driver fixation, right?
Maybe not.
In 1999, author Leon J. Podles warned in his book, The Church Impotent, that the feminization of Western Christianity would have dire consequences. Podles astutely observes that the psychological composition of young males requires them to undergo certain rites of passage, initiated by mature males, in order for them to achieve a healthy maturity. Failure to experience this initiation leaves the young male in a state of restlessness and revolt that Podles calls "hyper-masculinity" which necessarily "ends in nihilism, in a worship of the void and death." The most unfortunate of these misshapen men eventually come to "worship power in crime, Satanism, fascism, and Nazism – all of which are practical forms of nihilism." Others will succumb to moral relativism, which Podles calls " a disguised nihilism."
While The Church Impotent was a clarion call at a time when the full extent of the problems with the Catholic clergy (numerous pedophilic and/or homosexually-active priests) was not known, the absence of masculine religious role models is only part of the problem – the other being the absence of too many fathers in the lives of sons. Credit this to America's staggering divorce rate and to a family court system that does not fully recognize the need for a masculine role model in the development of a well-adjusted male.
Ultimately, Luke Helder must be held fully responsible for his actions, whether or not he fits a profile of young man denied of proper male role-modeling. But his personal culpability should not dismiss from our minds the fact that a serious societal problem exists in the form of a "mature masculinity crisis." The slide of young men into "hyper-masculinity" is preventable. But if the forces of radical feminism and political correctness continue to deny the grandeur of true masculinity and the need to nurture it in young men, the problem will worsen.
Being robbed of healthy masculine role models, young men will find surrogates. While a few will fall prey to fringe forces like neo-Nazism and street gangs, most will turn to the world of entertainment in search of an answer to the question "What is a man?"
And so they will chase after the media-induced fictions of what a real man is to no avail. Could it be that Luke Helder came to see through the pop culture lie as well – that he will never be a millionaire or a movie god or a rock star? The tongue-in-cheek nihilism of Fight Club seemed to help form his "way out." How many more might turn to something worse?
Right. Don't let that insignificant fact get in the way of writing your article. Why not mention Forrest Gump? He was running through the Midwest when he "inspired" the smiley face.
Fathers, mothers & Catholic sons - by Terry Mattingley HERE and HERE
One estimate states that around 50% of Roman Catholic priests are homosexual, and that the percentage is higher among those who are under 40.
At one seminary, 60% identified themselves as homosexual, 20% heterosexual and 20% were confused.
Dr. Leon Poddles, who is still Roman Catholic, but who dropped out of the seminary because of the rampant homosexuality there, said that while only about 1% to 3% of the general population is homosexual, the estimate for Roman Catholic Priests ranges from 10% to 80%.
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