Get On It, Guys! No Excuses!

     Look, either you want media that accurately represents your needs, desires, and interests, or you don’t. I’ve heard enough complaining about how all the major media are fully enlisted in the anti-man, anti-masculinity agenda. So pledge your support to Lincoln & Grant! What better chance for your voices to be heard and trumpeted by sympathetic media do you expect to get?

One Approach To An Armistice In Our Social Wars

     Say, it’s Guy Fawkes Day, isn’t it? What better occasion on which to blow something up?

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     I am of the opinion that just about any insult, slander, or epithet can be detoxified by a simple technique: embracing it. Thus, it troubles me not at all to be called a racist, sexist, lookist, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam. I smile and say, “So what? Does that hurt your bank balance any?”

     Of course, you must have a certain confidence in yourself to do this. You must believe yourself to be a worthy individual who can’t be harmed by verbal assaults on your dignity. You must also be willing to stand against such a tide no matter how loud or raucous it becomes. And of course, you must discriminate carefully between accusations about your opinions and imputations about your actions. The former may be withstood with sangfroid; the latter must be counterattacked immediately and with all your forces.

     Needless to say – though, in time-honored Fran Porretto fashion, I’ll say it anyway – this is not the conduct that prevails in our time. Decent men quail from every sort of accusation, largely because they fear that others will believe it. Should some of those others be employers, customers, or otherwise important to one’s well-being, and should they be similarly lily-livered, unpleasant consequences could ensue. Thus, the willingness to accuse others of all sorts of naughty attitudes has become the coin of the realm. This has been particularly important – and especially irritating to me – in the matter of relations between the sexes and the associated social pathologies of our era.

     Gavin McInnes has addressed an aspect of this in an interesting video:

     I’ll refrain from commenting on whether babysitters earn enough to rule our economy. What’s absolutely beyond dispute is the arrant cowardice of innumerable persons, some of them on the boards of directors of major corporations, before the “prepubescent girls” and their idiotic opinions. (Yes, some of those “prepubescent girls” are in their forties and fifties. Says something about the prevalence of arrested development in the human female, doesn’t it?)

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     Today, via Instapundit, we have a counterexample to one of the darkest of the threads wrapped around our societies’ throats:

     Pablo Picasso's former lover has sparked outrage following her claims that fewer women would be raped in France if they just smiled at men.

     Francoise Gilot claims people should just embrace the 'eroticism of the streets' rather than taking offence or being worried....

     'If a man whistles at you and you smile, that oils the social wheels and eases the tension between the classes and sexes…It's a kind of give-and-take that acknowledges that the other person exists, so in that sense it's not treating another person as an object.

     'To take offence all the time makes every relationship disagreeable,' says Ms Gilot.

     'Each time a man says something to me, if I take it as an insult, then I'll be insulted several times a day by strangers I'll never see again…Whereas if I smile vaguely and go my way, it doesn't cost me very much,' she claims.

     Admirable! Refreshing! Benevolent and civilized! And bound to draw the ire of the “angry ugly girls” (God bless you, Duyen) to whom it constitutes the rankest heresy, a clear declaration of Miss Gilot’s “gender treason.”

     In point of fact, the “angry ugly girls” are mostly angry because men won’t whistle at them as they pass by. Damned few of the gender warriors are pleasing to the eye. At 93 years of age, Miss Gilot is infinitely more appealing than any of them, largely because of her carriage and her self-command.

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     These past few years, a lot of pixels have been expended on concepts of “alpha males” and “beta males,” the latter term put into currency merely to denote those who don’t qualify for the former one. The “alpha” designation originated in the study of the behavior of pack animals. In a typical pack, there is usually a subgroup of “alphas” who do the pack’s hunting and fighting, protect its females, and generally assume its risks upon their own hides. The term was imported into contemporary horror and quasi-horror fantasy to denote the ruler of a pack of werewolves. “Alpha” status includes privileges as well as responsibilities; among other things, the pack’s females prefer them as mates.

     Though it’s somewhat variable in connotation, the “alpha” designation when applied to men seems to correlate with what I’ve promoted as the manly virtues:

     A man must learn "where the line is": the line that separates behavior that must be tolerated from behavior that must not be. He must be willing -- personally willing -- to fight in defense of the former and against the latter, though it might expose him to risk and cost him injury or death. He must be ready to swallow his distaste and protect the rights even of persons he finds repulsive, if they have harmed no other human being.

A man must learn proportionality and restraint. Biology has optimized the male body for purposive aggression, sudden acceleration and focused violence. These are not things to be deployed in their 200-proof strength against trivial or unworthy targets. A man doesn't kill the bounder who steals his parking space, his business idea, or his wife. Even a punch in the nose is excessive for infractions like these.

A man must learn never to shirk a freely contracted obligation. If you've said you'll do it, you do it. No excuses. Conversely, if you have failed to meet an obligation, you must admit to it and try to do better next time.

A man must learn not to whine about disappointments, reversals, or the ways of women. Especially about the ways of women. They're not men -- thank God -- and we can't fairly hold them to manly standards.

A man must learn reverence in the presence of the numinous. The fact that each of us is a part of an infinitely greater whole manifests itself in innumerable ways. Learning to let it in, to cherish it, and to use it to buttress oneself in times of darkness is critical to attaining the endurance the world expects from a man.

Last and most important, a man must transmit the manly virtues to his male children.

     Just as the manly virtues define the essence of respectable manhood, there are feminine virtues that define the essence of respectable womanhood:

• Nurturance of a man;
• Management of a household;
• The skills demanded of a mother.

     A woman who lacks those virtues isn’t merely a marginal creature, unlikely to contribute constructively to her society; she’s a disruptive and destructive force. A fair number of such women infest our society today. Worse, they’ve wangled special legal privileges that no one deserves nor should be allowed. In consequence, young men are being taught to fear: especially, to fear women. Young women are being taught to resent: especially, to resent men.

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     Teaching the manly virtues to his sons was once a father’s principal parental duty. Teaching the feminine virtues to her daughters was once a mother’s principal parental duty. I maintain that though the practice has deteriorated, the moral and social obligations of fathers and mothers have not.

     If the manly virtues are the qualifications for “alpha” status – and I can’t think of any better ones – then every man can aspire to that status. Indeed, for several decades all American men were regarded as alphas by the rest of the civilized world. The status was well deserved then, less so today.

     Am I proposing a return to “masculine roles” and “feminine roles” as practiced among our forebears? Why, yes: I am. They worked. They produced the country our social strife has come near to ruining. And despite the propaganda of the angry ugly girls, both men and women were far happier when they predominated.

     So here’s my prescription for an attenuation of our social wars:

• To men: Be masculine men:
  • Learn the manly virtues.
  • Then live them – and ignore their detractors.
  • If you can’t or won’t, then have the decency to stay out of the way of the rest of us.
• To women: Be feminine women:
  • Learn the feminine virtues.
  • Then live them – and appreciate masculine men as such.
  • Learn to be candid about what you want, and stoic if you fail to get it.
  • If you can’t or won’t, then shut the fuck up. You’ve already caused enough harm.

     That’s all. Where do you stand, Gentle Reader?

Really Quickies: The War On Masculinity Has Entered A New And Absurd Phase

     Hence this salvo from the New York Times. No, Gentle Reader, I won’t excerpt it here. You have to click the link and read it for yourself. That way I won’t be responsible for your death from laughter-induced asphyxiation.

     If there’s any abstract quality the Left hates more than traditional “leave me alone and keep your mitts off my wife” masculinity, I can’t think of it just now. We know what masculinity is and what it demands of us. We know what we’ve lost by permitting its attenuation. And we know how important the steady diminution of American men’s masculinity has been to the Left’s ambitions.

     Which makes it a very good thing that the Times’s readership has dwindled down to Manhattan liberals and those who yearn to be Manhattan liberals.

Quickies: Time Out For Some Brilliance

     We interrupt this sententious progression of politically-focused tirades by a retired engineer and hack novelist for an example of genuine brilliance from a previously unknown writer. Here’s the pith of it:

     We have become so focused on results that our actions have become a secondary concern. We judge men based on what they have instead of what they do. We signal our ideals instead of embracing them.

     In his short book Do the Work, [Steven] Pressfield relates a New Yorker cartoon that cleverly skewers our preference for thinking about things, rather than doing them:

    “A perplexed person stands before two doors. One door says HEAVEN. The other says BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN.”

     He’s perplexed. He’s considering the book. It’s funny because it’s absurd… and because we know we’d have the same consideration.

     That’s where we are as a culture. We run desperately to abstraction and avoid action at all costs. Thoreau’s man of “quiet desperation” has never been so prevalent.

     The world is full of men who are “stuck” in life. There has been some mass paralysis. Modern man has forgotten how to take action.

     Author Kyle Eschenroeder goes on to note that action does not guarantee success. Indeed, most action eventuates in failure – but failure is itself a step forward, if embraced and understood. As Louis Nizer wrote in My Life In Court, “Defeat is education. It is a step to something better.”

     Words to live by...especially for a retired engineer and hack novelist. I commend them to you all.

Off The Mishnory Road: The Stoic Virtues And Masculinity

Before we launch into today’s tirade, please read Dystopic’s latest opus at The Declination. The snippet that inspired me is at the very beginning:

There is a certain irony in the fact that Progressives, with their White privilege narrative, are too deeply rooted in European history to notice that other cultures are fundamentally unlike them. So when China tells them that human rights are a thing, and they are working on the problem, the Left blindly believes them. They do not understand the nature of Asian culture and persist in seeing it from a Western perspective.

The alpha male of the world order, the US, is neither willing nor capable of defending the steering system. It has ceased being the indispensable nation. The streak of idealism has disappeared, forcing the US to fall back on raw power despite the talk about soft power. Moral authority has slipped away, no longer available to support and substantiate US policies and interventions. [From this piece -- FWP]

Terminology is important here. The author carefully made use of the term “alpha male,” a code word on the Left that signals a universal derision. Your official Two-minutes Hate is now required. For them, this is a seminal moment. In their minds, the great Evil, the sinister demon, the focus of all their efforts, is finally beginning to topple from its golden throne. They have exposed the war mongering beast.

“Alpha male” a pejorative? Yes, indeed it is...on the Left. Did you think the anti-masculinity stance of the gender-war feminists was irrelevant to the greater whole? Quite the opposite: it’s at the heart of the Leftist philosophy, insofar as they have one.

Masculinity in this context has nothing to do with sex. It’s entirely about the virtues traditionally associated with the well-bred, well-reared Western man.In the classical era, masculinity was deemed inseparable from the Stoic Virtues:

Borrowing from the Cynics, the foundation of Stoic ethics is that good lies in the state of the soul itself; in wisdom and self-control. Stoic ethics stressed the rule: "Follow where reason leads." One must therefore strive to be free of the passions, bearing in mind that the ancient meaning of 'passion' was "anguish" or "suffering",[20] that is, "passively" reacting to external events—somewhat different from the modern use of the word. A distinction was made between pathos (plural pathe) which is normally translated as passion, propathos or instinctive reaction (e.g., turning pale and trembling when confronted by physical danger) and eupathos, which is the mark of the Stoic sage (sophos). The eupatheia are feelings that result from correct judgment in the same way as passions result from incorrect judgment.

The idea was to be free of suffering through apatheia or peace of mind (literally, 'without passion'),[21] where peace of mind was understood in the ancient sense—being objective or having "clear judgment" and the maintenance of equanimity in the face of life's highs and lows.

For the Stoics, 'reason' meant not only using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature—the logos, or universal reason, inherent in all things. Living according to reason and virtue, they held, is to live in harmony with the divine order of the universe, in recognition of the common reason and essential value of all people. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom (Sophia), courage (Andreia), justice (Dikaiosyne), and temperance (Sophrosyne), a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.

Following Socrates, the Stoics held that unhappiness and evil are the results of human ignorance of the reason in nature. If someone is unkind, it is because they are unaware of their own universal reason, which leads to the conclusion of kindness. The solution to evil and unhappiness then, is the practice of Stoic philosophy—to examine one's own judgments and behavior and determine where they diverge from the universal reason of nature.

If you’ve ever wondered about the origin of the “cardinal” virtues, there it is. Wisdom (alternately, prudence), courage (alternately, fortitude), justice, and temperance are just as essential to the well-bred, well-reared man today as they were to the classical Greeks.

In this connection, ponder this compact expression of Aristotle’s approach to happiness:

1. Happiness – that which we seek as an end in itself and for no other reason – is the consequence of a life well lived.
2. To live well requires the cultivation and consistent practice of the Stoic virtues.
3. We acquire the virtues by practicing them – i.e., by acting virtuously in advance of internalizing them.
4. Therefore, happiness – what we all seek – depends upon the practice of the Stoic virtues.

Gentle Reader, it could not be made any simpler.

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If you accept the above, it would follow that masculinity as the Stoics understood it is essential to happiness. (That the Stoics were less concerned with the feminine virtues need not trouble us here.) If a society’s men are adequately masculine – i.e., if they cultivate and practice the Stoic virtues – that society will have a good chance of being a happy one. Inversely, if a society’s men are notably unmasculine, that society will be mired in misery. It’s probably at the edge of destruction.

A happy society need not consist entirely of unvaryingly happy men. Every man will know setbacks, disappointments, and suffering at various times in his life. But a happy enveloping society will incorporate the attitudes, institutions, and mechanisms by which he can survive, persevere, and ultimately prevail over his troubles, with or without assistance. Note also that the assistance of others in one’s times of troubles is far more likely in a society that celebrates the Stoic virtues.

I argued in the previous essay that Leftists are hostile to the concepts of fun and play. That follows from their “The personal is the political” attitude toward all of human affairs. Fun and play are inherently personal experiences. They cannot be collectivized; they can only be sought by individuals, each to his own. Thus, the Left resents those quintessential manifestations of happiness: if you’re having fun, you’re insufficiently engaged in a Left-approved Cause.

I begin to sense that everything that conduces to happiness will countervail Leftist thought and goals. Nor am I surprised by that.

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To sum up: the Stoic conception of masculinity is a better approach to the concept than the simplistic contemporary idea of the masculine as purely aggressive. The famous maxim from John Bernard Books in The Shootist:

I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.

...captures Stoic masculinity better than any equally concise formulation, both in what it asserts and what it omits. There’s a reason for the enduring popularity of Western adventures such as that one; their heroes inspire us to think of what we could be.

To recover what we have lost, traditional Western masculinity, depending upon the Stoic virtues and their implications, must be conserved and perpetuated. To conserve it, we must defend it; to perpetuate it, we must celebrate it and the examples of it, and pass it on to our successor generations. The passivity and acceptance of subjugation characteristic of most Eastern cultures, which the Left would have us emulate, cannot stand against it.

More anon.

Enough Part 2: What Must Happen But Probably Won’t

Yesterday’s essay has excited a fair amount of mostly positive comment. However, some highly relevant questions should rise to the fore at this time:

• What does the threat of terrorism mean to ordinary Americans striving to go about their business in peace?
• What could be done to mitigate that threat?
• What will and what won’t be done to mitigate it?

With regard to those questions, recall the following two paragraphs of the earlier essay:

What lives in the heart that enables it to “reach” others – to commit to others’ defense, and to be confident that others are reciprocally committed? Values. A nation must be founded on either values or violence – and in either case, it must be capable of marshaling sufficient violence to defend itself and to punish those who have attacked it when the occasion demands it. But there are few values that can elicit that degree of willing commitment.

And:

Islam is massively useful to our political class. The powers that be are grateful for the threat it presents, and for the repeated evidences of that threat it provides. It serves to justify all manner of intrusions on Americans’ rights, and all manner of incursions upon our privacy. Thus, to expect that the State will ever act against Islam, regardless of how its atrocities proliferate, is a foolish notion.

The implications practically answer today’s questions all by themselves.

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First, we must grapple with the most annoying aspect of the threat of Islam: it’s not something against which we can wield our military, especially within the borders of the United States. It’s a belief system that has adherents in practically every nation on Earth, including some three million here in the Land of the Formerly Free. Some unknown percentage of Muslims are wholly in agreement with the jihadists; these either join in jihad campaigns or willingly lend the jihadists material and emotional support.

Islam is therefore a diffuse threat: spread unevenly among more peaceable men. Science fiction writer L. Neil Smith has told us that a diffuse threat must be countered with a diffuse defense. This is entirely correct. But what does it imply?

• A heavily armed civil society;
• General recognition of the viciousness of the Islamic creed;
• Governmental measures to prevent further Islamic immigration to the U.S.

At this time, none of those three conditions are in force. American civil society is armed to some extent, but not uniformly and not continuously. Islamic terror attacks, like atrocities of other kids, tend to occur where the probability of a prompt armed response is next to zero. Indeed, our major concentrations of population tend to have the most restrictive anti-firearms laws in the nation; getting a carry permit requires extreme notoriety, political connections, or both.

Due to the reluctance of decent Americans to view nominally peaceable neighbors as potential threats, there is no general recognition of the noxiousness of Islam. In this regard, governmental sources deserve much of the blame, for their endless repetitions of the mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace” and their habitual refusal to link terrorist acts by Muslims to the creed that plainly motivates them. However, our own inclination toward a “default amiability” cannot be excluded from the mix. Time was, we knew better than to assume that an allegiant to a creed that advocates our destruction “doesn’t really mean it.”

Finally, the members of the political class, here and elsewhere, regard an armed and alert citizenry like the ninth circle of Hell. Nothing else can check their excesses. Nothing else constitutes a serious threat to their power. Nothing else can overturn an established State with a minimum spillage of blood...especially, the blood of the revolutionaries. The hostility of government to the private possession of weaponry cannot be excised from the nature of government itself: an institution that possesses the privilege of using coercive force against individuals and other institutions.

We’re batting zero for three...and the ninth inning will soon be upon us.

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The most painful aspect of our condition has yet to be addressed: the enervation of our values.

As I wrote some time ago:

Get into your time machine, go back fifty years [i.e., to 1950 -- FWP], and walk the streets of any of the great cities of this continent. They were safe. They were almost perfectly clean. People didn't jostle one another, hurl obscene imprecations at one another, deface the sides of buildings with moronic scrawling, or pollute the air with pain-threshold levels of their preferred "music." Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection. Even the poor, of which, though they were less numerous than they are today, there was no shortage, were clean, self-reliant, self-respecting, and courteous.

The police would sort out those who couldn't meet the prevailing standards and would unceremoniously tell them to "keep moving," in which effort they were overwhelmingly reinforced by the non-uniformed public. If you wanted to surround yourself with degeneracy, you had to find the local Skid Row, the only place where such things were tolerated. It wasn't a big place, and the folks you found there permitted themselves no pride about their condition. No one indulged in nonsense notions about the "dignity" of the homeless, of welfare dependents, of drug addicts, of gang members, or any of today's mascot-groups for the coercive-compassion camp. As a result, government, which fattens on public perceptions of danger and disorder, was relatively small and unintrusive.

The American man of 1950 held to a different collection of values than does the man of 2015. He was unafraid of firearms, whether or not he owned one. He unhesitatingly supported the forces of order in their duties – and was quite appropriately shocked and angered when some member thereof shirked those duties or betrayed them for private gain. He was far more willing to put himself at risk when the occasion demanded it; indeed, a great many of the men alive at that time had done so quite recently, in Europe and the Pacific. He needed no one to tell him what deserved “tolerance” and what did not.

Men that manly and upright aren’t completely gone from our society, but they’re considerably fewer in number. In part that’s because of social devolution: parents allowing their sons to acquire bad, unmanly values, whether knowingly or otherwise. But in part it’s a consequence of governmental social-engineering programs designed to make men feel guilty about being men.

These days it takes unusual courage even to speak publicly against a threat to society. Imagine how rare is the degree of courage required to take up arms against it. That should tell you all you need to know about the pressures and constraints on our military.

In part, we’re zero for three on the conditions mentioned in the previous segment because we lack the manpower, in its exact sense, to bring them about. But that lack is not entirely the fault of today’s American man:

Throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of the rest of the First World, manhood -- masculine virtue and the self-respect that flows from it -- is being anathematized if not outlawed. Worse yet, it's been made risky to the practitioner. No aspect of male conduct is deemed too trivial to condemn. Believe it or not, there's a nation in Europe where urinating while standing up has been made into a penalizable offense. Think I'm kidding? Try it in a public loo in Germany and get back to me on the results.

Just as there is no defense, there is no Last Graf, wherein the wise and perspicacious commentator prescribes a cure for the malady. Manhood is being transformed into a liability at best, a crime at worst. Exhibiting traditional masculine virtue and civic duty in a public setting can get you arrested, brutalized or killed. Exhibiting gallantry toward a woman isn't quite as hazardous, but it's far from safe, especially if the woman is unknown to you. The "authorities," such as they are, are most definitely not on your side.

Turning that around is a prerequisite to attaining a proper stance against Islam.

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I wish I could be more upbeat about this. It’s simply not my nature to evade, deny, or obfuscate the facts. We’re in for a rough ride. Indeed, Americans look at the one nation on Earth that’s adopted something approximating an effective posture against Islam – Israel – and recoil almost as often as they applaud. That’s hardly a harbinger of better times to come.

More anon.

Want Your Manhood Back?

What's that you say? You've been emasculated? Political correctness, gender-war feminism, the rising tide of thuggery, and the Omnipotent State have ripped the spine from your body? You're becoming ever more fearful of the people around you, ever more reluctant to get out and about, ever more hesitant about leaving the door of your home unlocked? The world is just too much for you and you really wish it would just go away? Is that your problem, Bunkie?

Can't help you, Bubba. Your problem is that you're absolutely correct.

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This horrific story out of Merrie Olde England has been getting a lot of attention on the Web:

At least 1,400 children were victims of sexual exploitation in and around the northern English town of Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, according to an independent report released Tuesday, which censured public authorities for a collective failure in tackling the abuse.

The report marks the latest evidence of the alleged failure of public services in parts of the U.K. to deal with claims of child sexual abuse in recent decades. The 2010 convictions of five Rotherham-area men on a range of sexual-abuse charges and subsequent allegations of more widespread abuse and sex-trafficking have made the town a flashpoint in a recent wave of high-profile abuse allegations in Britain. Last month, Prime Minister David Cameron's government launched an independent inquiry into how public bodies across the country have dealt with claims of child sexual abuse, pledging to leave "no stone unturned."

The report alleges children and teens in the Rotherham area, which has a population of 258,400, were raped multiple times, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated. It cited incidents of children being doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns and made to witness violent rapes. Most of the victims were adolescent girls, many of them from troubled homes, the report said.

"This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day," Alexis Jay, the author of the report commissioned by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council last year, said in the summary of the findings. The council oversees the town of Rotherham and the surrounding, mostly rural area in South Yorkshire, some 8 miles from the northern steelmaking city of Sheffield.

Subsequent articles reveal that the various police departments and agencies with jurisdiction in South Yorkshire knew about the child sex grooming and trafficking...and let it pass. Take your guess as to why -- you'll only need one -- and then read on:

The report said that the majority of perpetrators were described as "Asian" or of Pakistani origin by victims, including the five men convicted in 2010. Still, it said, officials didn't engage directly with the area's Pakistani community to discuss how to address the issue, Ms. Jay said. Several council staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of alleged exploiters for fear of being seen as racist. Others remembered being told by senior staff not to do so, she said.

Just as "Asian" above was a substitution for "Pakistani," "Pakistani" is merely a way of not saying Muslim.

It wasn't just the police that knew this abuse was going on. It's impossible for the police to be aware of something like that without private citizens knowing about it as well:

In two cases, fathers had tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused - only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.

And one child declined her initial offer to give a statement after allegedly receiving a text from a perpetrator threatening to harm her younger sister.

The failures happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 'which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham'.

Teachers reported seeing children as young as 11, 12 and 13 being picked up outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown men in Rotherham or other local towns and cities.

So no one did anything, for a shameful reason: Britons fear their Muslim minority. The police fear to be called "racists," and the private, wholly disarmed citizenry, knowing that the police won't act, are afraid of reprisals should they even speak out. The entirely predictable result has been that the Muslims in the Sceptered Isle have concluded that they can get away with anything.

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We have lesser problems with Muslims here in the United States, but greater ones with our Negroes, overwhelmingly the racial group that perpetrates crimes of violence and crimes against property. Here as across the water, the enabling mechanism is the swift accusation of racial bigotry leveled against anyone who even speaks plainly about what we all plainly see. The police are seldom on the scene, and when present are all too frequently disinclined to act, for the same reasons as their colleagues in England.

As for action by private citizens: Forget it, Bubba. If you attempt to intervene in a street crime, you're likely to catch the worst of it for your presumption. You might be beaten badly, even killed. When the "authorities" arrive, you're likely to be arrested and charged with the others no matter what you did or tried to do -- and may God help you if you're found in possession of any kind of weapon, regardless of what the firearms laws are in that locale.

It's largely the same with the defense of one's own home. More than half of all burglaries and home invasions occur in jurisdictions where it's against the law, de facto, for you to use deadly force in defense of your property and privacy. Those who succeed in averting legal consequences for such action usually need the collaboration of the police, the occasional heartwarming stories to the contrary notwithstanding.

Against that backdrop, does the "knockout game," the plague of black-on-white rapes and other street crimes, or the opportunistic looting and destruction in Ferguson, Missouri really puzzle anyone?

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Possibly no pervasive social trend has undermined the manhood of American men more than the ongoing tendency, in service to gender-war feminist notions about "patriarchal capitalist oppression," to preconvict a man of anything a woman might accuse him of. Such accusations can be as substanceless as a charge of "sexual harassment" for telling a joke in which a woman is the butt, or as grave as an accusation of "assault" for having stood too close to a female colleague or having laid a hand on her shoulder. In either case, the accused is far more often than not required to undergo humiliating abasements of several kinds, including mandatory "sensitivity training," regardless of what actually happened or the known proclivity of the accuser for leveling such charges frequently and baselessly in the past.

I wrote yesterday about the incentives such a tendency engenders and the foreseeability of the consequences. Needless to say, nothing is being done to countervail it, with the exception of a few mouthy types such as your humble blogmeister spouting off about it. We've come to a point where even to hold a door for an unknown woman is socially risky beyond whatever tiny satisfaction one might derive for having behaved like a gentleman.

You say it can't be as bad as all that? Actually, you're right: It's worse. Just ask Debbie and Alvin McCuan, Raymond Buckey, and Gerald Amirault.

There is no defense.

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Throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of the rest of the First World, manhood -- masculine virtue and the self-respect that flows from it -- is being anathematized if not outlawed. Worse yet, it's been made risky to the practitioner. No aspect of male conduct is deemed too trivial to condemn. Believe it or not, there's a nation in Europe where urinating while standing up has been made into a penalizable offense. Think I'm kidding? Try it in a public loo in Germany and get back to me on the results.

Just as there is no defense, there is no Last Graf, wherein the wise and perspicacious commentator prescribes a cure for the malady. Manhood is being transformed into a liability at best, a crime at worst. Exhibiting traditional masculine virtue and civic duty in a public setting can get you arrested, brutalized or killed. Exhibiting gallantry toward a woman isn't quite as hazardous, but it's far from safe, especially if the woman is unknown to you. The "authorities," such as they are, are most definitely not on your side.

Stay home. Lock the door. Turn up the music to drown out the shrieks from outside. (No, don't watch the Idiot Box. That would only make it worse.) Lay in a good supply of booze and apply it liberally. Read a few retrograde books. Above all, forget your notions about the manly virtues and "your duties" to "your society." There's no point any more.

Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I'm just having another one of "those days." I'm sure I'll be back in fighting trim tomorrow.

Moving Lips Part 2: The Critical Deficit

Nearly ten years ago, I wrote the following at Eternity Road, in reference to an encounter a friend of a friend – a hairstylist – had with a crazy person who walked into her shop, demanded service, and then proceeded to go crazy on her:

The problem [i.e., with loonies walking about unconfined and unsupervised] is rooted in the disappearance of a little sign that once hung on the wall of every store, barbershop, tavern, and bordello in America:

We Reserve The Right To Refuse To Serve Anyone

You can still find that little sign in some shops, but legal changes have emptied it of its significance. For all practical purposes, no one who sells any good or service to the "general public" -- that is, with no requirement for prior introduction, specification, and negotiation -- can refuse to serve anyone, without risking both civil and criminal consequences.

So the loonies have their way with folks such as Heather's hairstylist friend.

America's loony population is not evenly distributed over the fifty states. They tend to concentrate in cities, with the greatest densities observable in the coastal megalopolises such as Los Angeles and New York. There's a lot of information buried in there, actually. Since loonhood normally includes a ravenous appetite for the attention of others, the loony will automatically go to where that can be had. Large cities offer the most potential victims, and large American coastal cities, which are utterly under the spell of leftist moral relativism, unearned guilt, and legally mandated "compassion" for the unfortunate, will naturally be the worst off.

Granted that there are degrees of loonhood. Heather's friend didn't suffer any physical damage from her encounters; she was merely offended and somewhat shaken by them. But a fearless researcher with a good pair of walking shoes could easily turn up a dozen far more radical cases, some physically threatening, in a single afternoon's stroll on the streets of New York.

It's not against any law to be an irritating, irrational whiner. It's not against any law to complain baselessly about one's treatment by some hardworking, longsuffering tradesman. It's not against any law to shout imprecations or outright threats at the objects of one's disaffection, with the exception of government officials in the performance of their duties. But damn it all, there used to be curbs on this sort of thing -- unofficial but quite stringent curbs that kept it out of the faces of the decent and honest, so that we could count on civility and courtesy even from complete strangers.

The more severely diseased of the loonies were confined for their own protection. Those with milder strains of the virus were told to "keep moving." And that is exactly as it should be.

Those who've read extensively of your Curmudgeon's blather will find this opinion unsurprising. Indeed, it seems to be widely shared. So why can't we act on it?

The answer is uncomfortable to ponder. We're afraid.

Well, some of us are afraid…and some of us aren’t:

I stopped into a church today intending to pray the whole Rosary (all 15 decades) sitting before Our Lord reposed in a tabernacle. I got through the Joyful Mysteries when a crazy man/professional panhandler entered the church begging for handouts. He zeroed in on me and wouldn’t relent. I tried to ignore him. Then… he touched me.

Now I’m engaged. It’s on. He curses me, turns and faces Our Lord in the tabernacle, curses Him, and then spits at Our Lord in the tabernacle. Now, this is where it gets… interesting. Crazy panhandler dude then wheels back on me and says, “Why don’t you go back? Why don’t you go back where you came from?” Over and over again. Now, I guess there is a certain general quality to that statement, but I found it interesting considering that the creature that was saying this had just cursed and then spit upon Our Blessed Lord reposed in the tabernacle. Hmmmm. Maybe someone doesn’t like me being here in Riverville. Edifying!

There were two men, excuse me, “men”, who were associated with the church sitting behind me, so I enjoined them to render assistance. [What I just did in that last sentence is called "foreshadowing". Can you guess how THAT turned out??] They replied that there was nothing they could do. Ah, the battle cry of the post-Christian “man”: THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO! So crazy panhandler dude, seeing that I’m on my own, decides to get bold. I drew him back away from the tabernacle, still trying to enjoin the “men” to get involved. Then, crazy panhandler dude charged me. And here is where the mental preparation pays off. He was about 15 feet away, and when he charged I thought three things in this order:

1. Trust in God and fear no man.
2. Move straight forward into the attack.
3. Meekness is power under control.

So, when he charged, I lifted my chin maintaining drilling eye contact, threw back my shoulders, dropped my daypack that was in my left hand in an “I’m getting ready to beat your ass in the two-fisted manner of the old school” sort of way, and stepped forward to meet him.

And you know what he did? Aw, guess. Go ahead.

Yup. Player stopped short and backed up.

He then continued to curse me and circle. I maintained drilling eye contact while still trying to enjoin the “men” to, oh, I dunno, at least STAND UP. Nada. And crazy dude charged me again. Same drill, same results. And then again. Finally, a woman, who I think was also on staff at the church, came in and at least had the stones to yell at the crazy dude. Finally, the crazy dude slunk off, and I left, after telling the “men” that their non-response response was a farce. And I finished the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries at another church later. And then I went to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, prayed for the crazy dude at the elevation of the Consecrated Host, received Holy Communion for him, and asked Our Lord to give ME whatever temporal punishment is required to make reparation for the crazy dude spitting at Him in the Tabernacle.

[Applause to David DeGerolamo for the link to the above.]

Ann Barnhardt is not a large woman. She wasn’t armed that day…at least, if she was, she omitted to say so. And as noted above, there were two adult men in the church with her. But she acted in her own defense, to confront and cow a larger and probably stronger opponent.

She had to. There was no one else in the church with a shred of character.

---

Character can be variously interpreted, but among American men, it’s traditionally been held to comprise an interlocking set of personal virtues:

• Honesty,
• Responsibility,
• Justice,
• Courage.

Those virtues are at the heart of the American mythos: our notions about what we are as a nation and our pre-eminence in the world. Our convictions about ourselves propelled us into several wars in which, strictly speaking, there was no American interest at stake. We’ve upheld the mythos in all but a very few occasions.

Well, actually, we didn’t. Our men at arms have upheld it for us. The rest of us mostly watched it on TV.

An informal, popular definition of the “manly man” is “the man who runs toward the sound of the guns.” This might overemphasize the martial mindset, but it is nevertheless striking in its penetration. He who exhibits personal courage – who willingly moves toward strife and violence, on the chance that he can contribute usefully to the resolution thereof – is more likely than not to possess the other critical virtues that make up character. He who hangs back, hoping that others will do what’s necessary, is more likely than not to be weak in the other virtues as well.

America’s all-volunteer armed forces tend to collect the former. That’s not to say that there are no cowards in uniform; every army has a few. But now that conscription is, for practical purposes, a dead letter, it takes an unusual degree of blindness to enlist with confidence that one will never see combat.

Note that from its inception, the Obama Administration has labored to weaken our military, to cleanse it of commanders of demonstrable patriotism and proven ability, and to undermine the soldier’s historical supports for courage under fire.

---

Part of today’s courage deficit in American men can be laid to the many laws that have disarmed us. Every such law is an abomination; the politicians who proposed and pushed for them ought to have been hanged for their presumption. But as usual, there’s more to the story.

Today, when private citizens intervene to halt a violent altercation, they put themselves at legal risk. That wasn’t always the case. Neither was it always the case that police arrived at such an incident “with guns blazing,” rendering everyone involved equally at hazard. Even the testimony of bystanders that Smith was a “good guy” trying to protect a victim from a mugging isn’t guaranteed to be sufficient to protect him from harassment – sometimes by the “justice system,” and sometimes from a lawsuit in civil court. The incentives to remain uninvolved, especially if one is unarmed, are several and large.

There’s more yet. From early in the Twentieth Century, public education came to be the default mode by which American children are schooled. The public schools are overrun with teachers and administrators who are determined that boys shall not be boys: that is, that they shall be conditioned out of their innate energy and aggressiveness, and that they shall be propagandized against the manly virtues at every opportunity. In effect, masculinity is now a liability for American boys, likely to get them in trouble when displayed in any fashion.

A twelve-year assault on masculinity by authority figures capable of inflicting innumerable punishments and humiliations on their victims is a tough thing to countervail, before, during, or afterward.

---

The political assault on manly courage is only the latest episode in the campaign to reave us of our character. Honesty? Responsibility? Justice? Which of these has not been assaulted by one or another political development? Are we still resolved to meet our own obligations and pay our own way? Are we still resolved to protect and support those who depend on us for protection and support? Do we still spurn the unearned, refuse the illicit, and eschew the “easy score?”

The State has already convinced many that they have no enforceable obligations: not to see to their own defense, nor to care for their children, nor for the elders, nor for themselves. The incursion into the medical industry followed naturally. Despite what several politicians nominally on the Right have promised, I wouldn’t bet that they’ll make a sincere effort to undo it. Too much power and too many rice bowls are at stake…and too many Americans turn ugly when you threaten to retract a freebie.

What has most of the jabber been about these past four years? Health care? Glory be to God! A man of character looks after his own health. He bears the consequences of his mistakes in his own flesh and from his own wallet. He doesn’t abuse his body with tobacco, alcohol, drugs, or sloth, and then insist that he has a right to have his maladies corrected – painlessly, of course! – at someone else’s expense.

Given all that, it’s something of a surprise that there are any Americans with character remaining.

---

The previous essay dealt specifically with the evolution of political deceit. But political deceit, like any political practice, will only flourish if it finds a niche – a habitat -- within which it’s profitable for the practitioner. Nearly two centuries ago, Thomas Babington Macaulay foresaw and spoke of what we suffer today:

The day will come when a multitude of people will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism and usury and asking why anyone should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want of necessaries. Which of the candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman? When Society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged Rome came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country, by your own institutions.

The vulnerability of Americans to demagoguery didn’t arise instantaneously. It had to be carefully nurtured from a judiciously planted seed: the Progressive Era policies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their machinations were welcomed by segments of our populace that were small at first. Those segments grew in tandem with the growth of the welfare state: each popular program gave rise to other programs of similar nature, while persons whose responsibilities had been taken off their backs by the State attracted others who desired the same benefits. Success always inspires emulation.

That dynamic has poised us at the edge of an economic and fiscal cliff. A nation half of whose people are “on the take” is determined that its “score” shall be protected and extended, no matter what that might do to those who retain enough responsibility to pay their own bills. And the politicians who’ve risen to high office by pandering to the characterless will allow no changes that might weaken their support.

---

To sum up: We have largely been reaved of the character that once defined the American man. Politicians began the process, and became bolder about it as ever more Americans “signed up” to be swaddled by the Omnipotent State. “Educators” have prosecuted the cause remorselessly for a century. Most poignant and painful of all, the best of us tend to separate from the rest of us by their election of military service, a wholly honorable and praiseworthy thing, but a choice which deprives us of their example in almost all cases.

And here’s where the “moving lips” motif kicks in: we continue to tell ourselves that “We’re Number One!” We continue to prate about how America is the Land of the Badass: Don’t mess with us or we’ll stomp you!

Who’s doing the lying now?

Female Idiocy (UPDATED)

[A Public Service Announcement, brought to you by Men Who Have Had It With Women's Pretensions To Equality Coupled With An Insistence On Being Treated Like Delicate Hothouse Flowers.]

Some things simply piss me off -- and I'm unembarrassed about it, feel fully justified at having my hackles rise over them, and am determined to do my part to grind them into powder. You're about to hear about one of them.

Have a gander at the following image:

Many American women would smirk and nod at that bit of obscenity. They'd pass it along to like-minded female friends, and possibly a few emotionally emasculated male friends, expecting nothing but giggles over it.

I'm not giggling, nor is any emotionally healthy man I know -- and whoever produced this faex is on notice that she's done her "sisters" a grave disservice.

You're on notice, ladies:

• Even hinting that "a few words" could provoke you to violence toward a man -- especially violence directed at his most sensitive parts -- is enough for decent men to rule you out of bounds for anything: acquaintance, employment, or any other form of courteous association.
• Suggesting that some other "few words" could earn one of us "a blowjob" is beyond mere insult: it's both humiliating and degrading -- to both sexes.
• Men restrain themselves around you out of awareness of our several advantages over you. As a rule:
  1. We're larger and stronger;
  2. We're also smarter -- to judge by the bilge that dominates "women's magazines," the Oxygen cable station, and "Women's Studies" courses, much smarter;
  3. We have better control over our impulses;
  4. We don't strike to humiliate; we strike to wound or kill.

Compared to that, your fine motor control means approximately nothing.

So as they say in the Navy, now hear this:

You are not men's equals.

Here's the proof:

1. You demand "equal treatment" while simultaneously demanding that women be held to lowered standards;
2. You've agitated ceaselessly for laws that privilege women over men, especially as regards employment, sex, marriage, and the family;
3. You take without giving, treating what you receive from men as your God-given right but what you return as an act of generosity or a damned imposition on your time and patience;
4. Your representatives in the schools constantly strive to make boys over into little girls;
5. Whenever you're challenged on any of the above, you scream "sexism!" or whine like two year olds denied a demanded treat.

Which is why American men who still possess a shred of masculine self-regard won't marry you or procreate with you, treat you with suspicion at all times, speak derisively of your oh-so-vaunted "accomplishments" and the viragoes who trumpet them, and are generally disdainful of your entire sex.

Think about that when you next hear a "joke" about kicking one of us in the nuts.

PS: I don't want a "blowjob" from any woman, including my beloved wife. The act is degrading to both parties. Come to think of it, that's probably why so many people are obsessed with it. Ours is a thoroughly degraded culture. A single hour of television viewing is ample evidence to that effect.

UPDATE: The incredulously enraged can further elevate their blood pressure, if they like, over this post. Happy fulminating.

It Was A Long Time Ago...

...and it involved mainly veterans of World War II...
...and somehow, I doubt that Tom Cantrell looked that much like G. W. Bailey...
...but this is more or less how the Battle of Athens, 1946, took place:

Something to think about in between bouts of complaining about our emerging national tyranny,

The Mind Killer: Thoughts On Fear

First, some quotes:

No power is strong enough if it labors under the weight of fear. [Marcus Tullius Cicero]

Fear always springs from ignorance! [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it...The basest of all things is to be afraid. [William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech]

Fear is an acid which is pumped into one's atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to all energy and growth. [Horace Fletcher]

Fear is like fire: if controlled, it will help you; if uncontrolled, it will rise up and destroy you. [John F. Milburn]

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. [Bertrand Russell]

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.) [Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love]

---

Some years ago, when I was crafting a handful of unusual protagonists for a novel about an unusual family, I had occasion for an extended reflection upon fear. Among the emotions, it alone is "wholly horrible" [C. S. Lewis]. Yet it is one of the two motivators critical to the mentality required for survival. Maslow's Hierarchy should make that obvious. But there's that word again...the one that really means overlooked.

Among the reactions a military recruit must be conditioned to suppress is the fear-powered impulse to flee from combat. Combat is, after all, the reason he's there. To flee is to yield to the enemy. If you're going to do so reflexively, why bother to enlist? If an army is to do so at the first incoming fire, why bother to have an army?

Some armies, be it noted, have been unsuccessful at suppressing their soldiers' fear reaction. Some interesting stories, of Arab armies fleeing from numerically far smaller Israeli forces before battle was joined, came out of the Six-Day War.

Fear is the most important emotion of all in politics:

"The State is based on threat." [Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!]

Governments are sustained almost entirely by the fear they engender in their subjects: fear of one another; fear of external enemies poised to strike; and fear of the government itself.

Yet a thing filled with such power is inherently useful, if it can be mastered and harnessed. "Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords," as Genly Ai says to Therem Harth rem ir Estraven in Ursula LeGuin's early masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness. Estraven says, almost wonderingly, of Genly Ai that "He makes fear serve him." But Estraven finds illumination in that remark:

I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.

As the perils to life, health, and material security mount around us, it becomes ever more urgent that we find ways to master and harness our fears: each of us, and all of us.

---

The old are often dominated by their fears and their responses to them. I speak from experience on this. Quite a lot of my energy, in these waning years, goes to buttressing myself and my loved ones against the threats I see, or fancy that I see. I'd imagine that's true of quite a lot of us older folks. If you've had five or six decades of pleasant existence on this ball of mud, you're easily led to thinking of security above all other things:

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it,” while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of really being at home on Earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the old. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

Today, when the State has become predatory beyond all expectation and its eyes are everywhere, the sense of insecurity among those of us ill-equipped to fight it directly is stronger than ever. The urge to withdraw into anonymity and invisibility can overpower us. And that, of course, is exactly what our political masters want.

Have a gander at this article, reflect on what it means for the right to keep and bear arms, and ponder: Will that right be undone de facto, by Gestapo tactics of the sort John Filippidis and his family endured? Then have a look at the statistics in this paper, and ponder whether you can master your fears sufficiently to speak out against such tyranny.

---

[C]ourage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

The beauty of courage, the way in which it evokes unconditional admiration from all but the meanest-souled, is the confirmation of the importance of that virtue -- and of the importance of the fear that must be overcome to exhibit it. Courage is the essential component of any realistic hero, for a hero is one who is willing to accept risk, or hardship, or sacrifice, for something larger than his self-interest. We're capable of detecting it even when it's not on immediate display:

"I'd not have guessed, Andrew. I'd not have thought you capable of it. When we met, when I first looked upon your face, I said to myself, 'if ever there's lived a man who knows not the taste of fear or failure, this is he, here he is before me.' " [Me, here]

But there is this: those "meanest-souled," knowing themselves to be the prisoners of their fears, are enraged by both courage and the admiration of courage. The recognition of that virtue in others inherently demeans them. He who has submitted to fear is unable to bear comparison with one who has mastered it. That's why the legions of the Left are relentless in condemning books and movies that portray genuine courage in action for wholesome ends. To him who has surrendered to fear, it is imperative that courage be snuffed out -- that no trace of it remain to garner the admiration of others.

That goes a long way toward explaining the tirades of condemnation toward movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and Lone Survivor, doesn't it?

---

In the mood I'm in this morning, I could go on this way for thousands of words more, but I'll spare you. Anyway, one more quote, probably the best-known fictional statement about fear, from Frank Herbert's classic Dune:

"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." [Frank Herbert, Dune]

Truly blessed is he who can do so...but how many can? Is it learnable? Or teachable? Or is it forged solely from impulse and experience?

Food for thought.

The Yums And The Sneers

I hadn't intended to write anything today. Really. Here at the Fortress of Crankitude, New Year's Day is traditionally reserved for junk-food recovery and miscellaneous grousing about undelivered mail-orders. But Ace backlinked to a post I didn't see when it was "fresh:"

Everyone likes sweets, of course. But he [Adam Carolla] was getting at the idea of reversion to the juvenile. That adults, rather than simply attaining the taste for actual coffee, and you know, drinking coffee, were instead reverting to their Childhood Palates of insisting that all things be "nummy."

That they be very sweet, and even very cute. "Moccachino." That's cute, isn't it?

And what adults had historically done, he said, was embrace adult tastes. Cigars taste good to an adult cigar smoker because he has cultivated that taste. Oysters don't taste good to a kid; oysters taste good to an adult who has cultivated a taste for oysters. Cognac isn't good because it's sweet. Cognac is good because we have embraced adulthood and trained ourselves to embrace more sophisticated tastes.

...and it got me thinking...and you, Gentle Reader, are about to suffer the consequences.

---

The heart of the Carolla / Ace tirade is the concept of acquiring the taste.

In one of Steven Brust's non-Dragaera novels, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille, there's a brief exchange between the narrator-protagonist and his love interest:

    She sat down next to me and sipped some of my drink. She made a face.
    "It's single-malt whiskey," I said. "It's an acquired taste."
    "Why did you want to acquire it?"

There is a wealth -- a genuine wealth, not just another bit of Fran Porretto hyperbole -- of insight in those three lines:

• Hard liquors are unkind to the digestive system, particularly the liver and the stomach;
• Whiskey is very expensive;
• Whiskey of any sort tastes biting and medicinal.

So why did he want to acquire a taste for it?

In another novel, Michael Halberstam's neglected classic The Wanting Of Levine, the protagonist invests considerable effort in "acquiring the taste" for tequila, which he originally characterizes thus:

    "This is good tequila," the friend said.
    Levine tried it. The stuff tasted like the sweat of hell.
    "If this is good tequila," he said, "then what is bad?"
    "Don't ask," the friend said.

In that case, there was an explicit reason: Levine, a Northeastern Jewish traveling salesman who had been assigned the Deep South as his demesne, believed that to win the confidence of his target customers, he had to be able to drink with them. He had, therefore, an economic motive for subjecting himself to considerable displeasure until he'd become accustomed to it.

Clearly, pleasure did not enter into Levine's consumption of this "luxury good."

---

When I was a lad, I discovered, upon first encountering them, that I liked certain foods that other children routinely disdained:

• Liver
• Mushrooms
• Spinach
• Broccoli
• Brussels Sprouts

This evoked a lot of "ewww!" commentary from other children near to my age. I wasn't supposed to enjoy those things. I was violating "guild rules" by liking them and admitting to it. I shrugged it off -- I've always been something of a maverick -- but it's remained a point of curiosity with me ever since.

Mind you, I also enjoyed various delights that nearly all children enjoy -- chocolate; ice cream; pastries of just about any variety -- but that wasn't newsworthy. That was "well, he's a kid after all" stuff. My defections from juvenile solidarity on the thou-shalt-not-enjoy food list were what evoked comment.

But note: all the other kids, in their desperation to "be grown-up," wanted to smoke. To me it seemed the most pointless and disgusting practice any human being had ever adopted. More, I could see that the attempt to smoke inflicted suffering and damage on my coevals. Why were they doing it?

I still enjoy all the things I did as a child, without changes. I still reject all the things I rejected as a child, with one exception: I came to enjoy semi-sweet white wine. And in this Year of Our Lord 2014, I shall celebrate my sixty-second birthday.

---

The whole "juvenile tastes" versus "mature tastes" business is an artificial attempt to separate adults from children in a qualitative way. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's a crock of shit. There is no qualitative difference by which an "adult" can be told from a "child." All the differences are differences of degree, including the most important one: the acquisition and acceptance of responsibilities.

There's an admirable authenticity, in my eyes, about an adult who'll admit to still loving ice cream, chocolate, and sweets. It's not that I share those tastes, but that so many adults who do share them are abashed about them and conceal them as best they can. Recent commercials by a certain tequila company to deride such tastes strike me as offensively manipulative: "Drink this so you'll look like a man."

BALDERDASH!

Here's how to "look like a man:"

• Stand behind everything you say.
• Take full responsibility for your actions.
• Fight for innocents who are unable to fight for themselves.

If you've been casting about for New Year's Resolutions to adopt, feel free to use those three; no charge. Forget the condemnation of "nummy tastes." If you genuinely enjoy sweets, the sole reason to eschew something of that variety is diabetes.

And seriously, folks: Happy New Year.

"Our Church" -- ?

Courtesy of our beloved InstaPundit comes this curious report:

How Far Should Churches Go to Appeal to Men?

One question has plagued the modern church over the past few years: how to appeal to men, particularly to fathers? Churches across North America have tried different tactics to lure men into the fold, with varying degrees of success. Men’s events like motorcycle rallies and fish fries often work. Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix once temporarily replaced a planter in their foyer with a motorcycle in an attempt to attract male members. Eastridge Community Church, where I am a member and serve, has brought in various players and coaches from the University of Georgia football team for men’s events.

But should churches consider the impact of their worship music? The women of one church in Canada did, and they enacted changes that increased their male attendance....

Without changing anything other than the music, the church’s gender gap quickly evaporated. Men participated more, including a marked increase in the number of men who spoke their praises aloud to God. And overall attendance grew.

The title of that piece -- "How Far Should Churches Go To Appeal To Men" -- irritates me greatly, and for more than one reason. But the body of the thing is puzzling in the extreme. A superficial change -- the excision from the liturgical music schedule of pieces deemed "too feminine" -- increased both male attendance and overall attendance? Really? How about asking the next questions?

• Who are these new male attendees?
• What sort of men are they? Husbands or singles? Fathers or childless? Workingmen, idlers, or retirees?
• What prompted them to attend? (After all, they couldn't experience the change in music without first being there, now could they?)

Superficial matters matter to the superficial; the rest of us yawn and change the channel. All the same, at least someone has noticed that men have distanced themselves from churchly attendance and involvement in an unprecedented proportion. But it would be nice were our clerics to consider soberly what it is about contemporary Christian practices has so depopulated their congregations of Y chromosomes.

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Any question that asks "why men," or "why women," or "why women but not men," et cetera ad nauseam infinitam, is a question about the innate differences between the sexes. Inasmuch as one risks being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail for even daring to suggest that there are such differences, it's no surprise that such questions are asked only infrequently and always sotto voce.

All the same, one of the reasons you come here, Gentle Reader, is because I'm crazy enough not only to ask such questions, but to do so in a loud voice, and to answer them without regard for popularity, political correctness, or who might take offense. So let's get it on, shall we? To begin, the most salient and penetrating questions are:

1. What differences between the sexes are relevant to Christian affiliation and involvement?
2. Are those differences natural, cultural, or incidental to particular congregations?
3. Has the Church changed perceptibly? If so, was it in "message," or merely in tone?
4. What aspects of those changes would appeal differentially to men and women?
5. What forces or influences brought those changes about?

Let's examine the matter through those lenses.

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The Church exists to conserve and promulgate the Gospels of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind. It has no other legitimate mission. Those Gospels, which a sincere Christian believes to be substantially accurate records of the commandments and other teachings Christ bestowed on Mankind, constitute the whole of the Christian creed, mythos and ethos both.

Time was, Christian clerics understood this. They stuck to the Gospels. They emphasized their primacy, and were humble before the Authority expressed therein. They didn't try to lard the Gospels down with officious dictates that have no foundation in the words of Christ.

Time was.

Today's Church -- and in using the capital C, I don't mean to refer solely to the Catholic Church, though it stands at the center of Christianity and is ever in my thoughts -- doesn't exactly demean the Gospels, but it certainly emphasizes quite a lot of activity beyond the promulgation and explication of the Gospels. Most of that activity falls under one of two headings:

• "Good works"
• "Reaching out"

"Good works," one of the doctrinal tenets of Catholicism and an important part of most of Protestant Christianity as well, have been at the forefront of congregational activity for centuries. "Reaching out" is a modern addition, an attempt to increase congregation size by appealing to groups traditionally uninterested in or hostile toward the Church. Both these motifs result in the proliferation of "programs."

It sometimes seems that the most serious activity in a Catholic parish is making sure there are "programs" for every imaginable "need," and that all such activities are well staffed and funded. Some such "programs" do have some relation to Jesus's teachings, though some are feel-good exercises that don't objectively benefit anyone, and one or two are actual departures from the wisdom of the Redeemer. But all require participants, and therefore time.

Even today, with women in the American labor force to an unprecedented degree, women have more discretionary time per capita than men.

Christian clerics can't help but respond to this. More, experience shows that people tend to collect around those like them, and that those who already give are the best bet for giving more. Thus, once a "program" becomes female-dominant, it tends to accelerate in that direction until male participation has dwindled to little or none.

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Statistically, men tend to prefer individual decision-making and action. Eons of evolution have oriented us toward the roles of protector and provider. We outperform women at tasks that require aggression, concentration, and symbolic manipulation. Though we are capable of the full range of human emotions, we tend to subordinate emotional considerations in our decision-making. The manly virtues are not some sort of artificial veneer we don for mating purposes, but an expression of our natures.

Statistically -- I have to keep saying that if I don't want some feminist harridan to start raving about exceptions that "disprove" my thesis -- women tend toward consensus decision-making and collaboration. Eons of evolution have oriented them toward collective action, particularly in matters that go beyond an individual woman's individual or familial concerns. They outperform men as organizers and front-line managers, though their advantage disappears at higher levels in a corporate hierarchy. They are more susceptible to emotional appeals than men. And of course, they are more domestically and parentally oriented than most men, though those traits are probably not germane to this subject.

These divergences between the sexes factor into involvement in the Church in certain ways. The "programmatic" aspect is probably clearest, as any "program" is likely to emphasize consensus and organization over individual initiative. But the differences also affect our responses to religious rituals. A rite that attempts to elicit powerful emotions rather than depths of comprehension will be more to women's tastes. To the extent that contemporary religious practices emphasize the emotional aspect of Christianity -- and the trend in that direction began decades ago -- they appeal more strongly to female communicants, perhaps far more strongly.

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Perhaps the most painful aspect of the disaffiliation of men from the Church pertains to preachments from the pulpit.

When the CSO and I go on vacation, I make a point of acquainting myself with the local Catholic parish, at least to the extent of attending Mass. The trend in sermonizing has quite definitely been away from salvation and toward Earthly compassion. Indeed, much of that preaching explicitly exhorts the congregants to endorse and support specific government programs. As a man determined to keep my own counsel about politics and make my own decisions about charity, the practice repels me; I find it hard to imagine a self-respecting man who'd react favorably to it.

But women seem to like it. The emotional reward from "doing good"...well, at least according to the pastor's own lights...appears to influence them positively and powerfully. Groups that respond to such exhortations, particularly those concerned with some political issue, are almost uniformly female.

That's a considerable departure from the words of Jesus:

“Be careful not to display your righteousness merely to be seen by people. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in heaven. Thus whenever you do charitable giving, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and on streets so that people will praise them. I tell you the truth, they have their reward. But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your gift may be in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. [Matthew 6:1-4]

...but it synergizes with women's preference for collective action.

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All the above combine into a single thrust toward female preferences and aptitudes. They fail to ratify men's preferences, our special capabilities, or the manly virtues to which Christian men have traditionally aspired. The overall effect is to give many Christian men the sense that the Church is indifferent to us or worse -- that women have the tiller and will keep it to themselves. As we prefer not to insert ourselves where we're not wanted, the consequences could not be more obvious.

If Christian clerics are conscious of these forces and approve of them, I fear there's little to be done. To those who are unaware, or who are bewildered by the absence of men from the pews and "programs:" Consider this a wake-up call.

The Pact: An Exegesis

When I write something like "The Pact," I often feel as is I'm indulging a personal need: a yearning for an unrealizable fantasy world populated by superhumans and heroes. There's some truth to that. My protagonists are usually larger than life. I prefer to leave the dreary musings upon the fancies and failings of ordinary folk to the "literary" set.

All the same, a story such as "The Pact" expresses an important insight, one that today's gray heads of international relations and diplomacy will not suffer to be mentioned in their presence:

In relations between nation-states,
Power and the will to use it are all that matter.

Statesmen dispute this at their peril.

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Power -- the capacity to compel, prohibit, and expropriate by the use of force and / or intimidation -- is the antipodes of freedom.

It's not as widely known as it should be that the Founding Fathers were extremely reluctant to permit the federal government a standing army. Standing armies had been for centuries the bane of the common people of Europe. They were seldom used in "defense of the realm," but rather as instruments of oppression and depredation against the very populations that were taxed to fund them. When Article I of the Constitution was finalized, the major reactions against it, from within the Convention and from persons outside privy to its deliberations, was that allowing Congress both the taxing power and the power to maintain a standing army constituted an obvious threat to the people's newly won liberty.

Hearken to Patrick Henry, orating to the Virginia Convention:

Congress, by the power of taxation, by that of raising an army, and by the control of the militia, has the sword in one hand and the purse in the other. Shall we be safe without either? Congress have an unlimited power over both; they are entirely given up by us. Let him candidly tell me where and when did freedom exist, when the sword and the purse were given up by the people? Unless a miracle in human affairs interposed, no nation ever retained liberty after giving up the sword and the purse.

Yet in a world partitioned into quarrelsome nation-states, each poised and ready to encroach upon the territory and prerogatives of the others, no security is possible without a substantial military establishment. Indeed, the much-discussed condition we call sovereignty is a consequence of the possession of such an establishment. A nation without the power to enforce its borders is not and cannot be sovereign. It exists solely at the sufferance of other nation, and will cease to exist upon the instant another nation perceives advantage in molesting it.

So long as nation-states exist, there will be standing armies, and navies, and air forces, and strategic deterrents, and war colleges to train their commanders, and intelligence establishments to inform them, and squabbles over just how much military the nation needs and can afford. A nation whose people are largely free and want to remain so must accept that, or confront the loss of all freedom to the first predatory nation under whose lustful gaze it comes.

Military fiction author Tom Kratman, in his recent novel Countdown: H Hour, put it most memorably:

"People band into nations, real nations -- not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations -- to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that."

There's more wisdom in those seventy-six words than in the entire Congressional Record.

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If we go solely by the size and capabilities of its military establishment, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, indeed in all of history. But capability is not enough; it must be mated to the willingness to use it when the occasion demands it.

When I had President Stephen Graham Sumner say:

“The United States has seldom played the diplomacy game as well as your nation, Ambassador....We have this problem, you see. We’re habitually honest with others, even when those others have displayed no penchant for honesty themselves....But in the usual case, once we’ve discovered that we’d been lied to, we ceased to talk. I dare say you’d rather we kept talking, wouldn’t you, Ambassador? Considering the alternatives, that is?”

...he was articulating one of our severest deficiencies in international dealings: our desire to accept the other party as sincere in all his representations. We don't rise above that desire nearly as often as we should. In a typical diplomatic interchange between nations, the sincerity level seldom rises above 25% and never reaches 50%. Yet our diplomats habitually take the other fellow's word as reliable and sincere.

[If you'd like to read more about Sumner and his rise to power, go here.]

That desire to believe the other guy good-hearted has been our undoing on several occasions. We'd probably have fought half as many wars had our diplomats managed to pull off their rose-colored glasses at the appropriate times. That includes those occasions when the diplomat in question was the president of the United States.

A provocation such as the one described in "The Pact" is a probe: an exercise undertaken specifically for the purpose of eliciting a response to be analyzed. The aggressor nation seeks to gauge its target's willingness to court open conflict. If the will is there, the probe is unlikely to be repeated; if not, further, deeper probes are guaranteed, possibly culminating in a full-scale war.

“Probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” -- V. I. Lenin

Whatever his failings as an economist, Lenin understood the dynamic that governs international relations.

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Along with the view of international relations I've explicated above, I had another goal in mind with "The Pact:" to depict the conduct I want to see in a president of the United States when confronted with an aggressive probe. In recent years, only John F. Kennedy has exhibited firmness anywhere near that -- and he had to suffer a number of painful international humiliations to convince him that a strong stance was necessary if the U.S. was to thwart the threat posed by Soviet nuclear-armed IRBMs in Cuba.

A president with Stephen Graham Sumner's grasp of reality and a strength of will to match it would be a hero of a sort we haven't had since long before Kennedy -- and Americans are starving to death for a genuine national hero. The parade of sports poseurs and celebrities "famous for being famous" has failed to nourish us, as we should have realized.

In my view, any man who accepts the duties and responsibilities of Commander-In-Chief has made a pact with the nation that elevated him: to represent its interests fearlessly and in full confidence that the government, the military, and the people are wholly behind him. Many a president has failed not just one of those criteria but all of them.

Yet it was not always so. Before World War II, even men who disputed the wisdom of this or that international sally, or of our entry into this or that conflict, would close ranks behind the government while negotiations progressed, and behind our forces when a decision to go to war was reached. The presidents of those times could wage both diplomacy and war in confidence -- justified confidence.

May it be so again...and may we have presidents worthy of such wholehearted support.

A Spot Of Maritime Glory And Tradition

Have some versified valor, courtesy of Walt Erickson:

The rolling sea is restless in the dark
The silent ships glow faintly as they move
With purpose past the looming darkened shore
Where guns and lighted matches lay awake
In fog the forty-four waits for the spark
The flash, the roar, the broadside that will prove
The enemy is there and what is more
He’ll fight for honor and for glory’s sake
The years, like seas, go silent on their way
The wooden walls have given way to steel
Sharp eyes in crows nest no more climb the shrouds
And wooden decks no longer spread with sand
The ships still sail, still anchor in the bay
A rating still stands silent at the wheel
The sun still shines behind the lowering clouds
The Navy still protects this golden land

Gorgeous.

Three Little Words

Apologies, Gentle Reader. I'd intended to write about a recent development in "tax code warfare," but my state of mind at the moment won't permit it. Perhaps I'll set to it later. If my topic of choice is of less interest to you, well, I beg your indulgence.

During the Eighties, when America awoke from five decades of socialist fantasies, there was an explosion of business-advice books. Many of those books were written by the CEOs of large, successful companies. Unfortunately, the advice in most of them was mainly of use to the CEOs of other large companies. However, even those often contained nuggets of great utility to us lesser beings.

One such book, Mark McCormack's tome What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School, stands above the rest for its breadth of applicability and appeal. I have a particularly striking segment in mind at the moment: the one in which he enumerates three short statements, each a mere three words, the mastery of which distinguishes the mature adult from the child and the pretender. The three statements:

1. "I don't know."
2. "I need help."
3. "I was wrong."

Human beings appear to have more difficulty with those three statements than with any other utterances in any language.

There's no real mystery about it. No one likes to admit to limitations, or fallibility, or to having erred or having given offense. To do so is to assume, albeit temporarily, an attitude of humility -- hopefully a sincere one -- and to imply willingness to be educated, assisted...or forgiven. But precisely because we know that all men are limited, fallible, and prone to sinning against one another, only one who is willing to admit his limits and lapses can earn the unconditional trust of those around him.

For reasons of a private nature, it's the third of those three statements that's uppermost in my thoughts this morning.

Not to be too overbearing about it, a man's reaction to being informed that he's erred or has given offense is among the best practical measures of his character. He may have many faults; most of us do. But the willingness to admit to one's missteps and failings is the key to the golden door to self-improvement. That door cannot be opened by any other device.

If you've seen the movie Dirty Dancing, you're undoubtedly familiar with the climactic scene in which Jerry Orbach's character apologizes to Patrick Swayze's for having misjudged him:

"When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong."

It was a perfect capper to the scene and the movie, even though the ending -- the presumably permanent parting of Johnny and Baby, despite the intensity of their brief love affair -- was achingly bittersweet. And it was the most educational moment of the movie for any young adult who saw it...and for many a child in a grown-man's body, as well.

We don't spend long in this world. What time we're allowed is greatly improved by mastering the use of Mark McCormack's three little statements above...especially that third one.