Real Men

There has been a recent spate of things written here, there and everywhere about real boys and real men. It is a reaction to the feminization of the male that has infected American culture. These days boys are to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and drugged into stupor and men are to be taught to cry in public at the whim of any female. Violence of any kind is to be roundly condemned and we are told that the only thing worth studying in college is Peace Studies with a minor in Lesbian Poetry.

Real men---military guys, cowboys, meat eaters, gun owners and whiskey drinkers---are to be substituted with metrosexual-men---queer eyes for straight guys, public pouters, vegetarians, Chablis drinkers, lisping and swishy sorts and Oprah watchers.

There have appeared books to remedy such anti-male agit-prop, such as The Dangerous Book For Boys, and many lists of things ‘real men’ are supposed to do. Here is an old list from Robert Heinlein.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Here is a new list from Popular Mechanics.

Patch a radiator hose, protect your computer, rescue a boater who has capsized, frame a wall, retouch digital photos, back up a trailer, build a campfire, fix a dead outlet, navigate with a map and compass, use a torque wrench, sharpen a knife, perform CPR, fillet a fish, maneuver a car out of a skid, get a car unstuck, back up data, paint a room, mix concrete, clean a bolt-action rifle, change oil and filter, hook up an HDTV, bleed brakes, paddle a canoe, fix a bike flat, extend your wireless network.

Before any males start to cry and lament their supposed lack of the manly arts, they need to remember that these sorts of lists are geared to the times. They no more apply to all men in all ages than do trends in male sartorial elegance. Consider the greatest society of men that ever existed, the Roman Republic (509 – 30 BC).

Here indeed was a men’s club of men’s clubs, any member of which would put to shame most of today’s mincing and prancing delicate little dandies whose claim to maleness rests solely upon the possession of a penis. So few Roman men could perform those things above, yet they brought the entire ancient world under their thumb.

Here is a list of things every Roman male over the age of 18 needed to know in 100 BC.

Handle a short sword, throw a javelin, walk 30 miles a day with full military panoply, bake bread on the march, build a small city every night, sew and repair clothing and sandals, work in teams of 100, handle mules, be accustomed to slaying men while stepping in urine, intestines and feces, kill men until the centurion tells you to stop, build and repair siege machines, siege works and artillery on the fly, become a master at taking well-defended towns, become acquainted with the price and maintenance of slaves around the Mediterranean, become expert at pick, axe and shovel, be well-rehearsed at close order drill, small infantry tactics and hand-to-hand combat, plant and harvest wheat, understand political propaganda, obey orders, give orders, construct latrines, forts, roads and aqueducts.

Not too shabby, all things considered. And who among us outside of the US Marines can do many of these today?

A list of what a real man needs to know should be tied to the nature of ‘maleness,’ an immutable thing which has not changed since Cain clobbered Abel. We men are simple creatures, and whatever things we absolutely and positively must know needs to be arranged around our nature, which is---and ladies, please take notes---based on the following:

We are naturally aggressive, competitive and violent. Any sort of gooey, multicultural and PC pap that tries to remove such behavior will only ruin the lives of those poor males who are forced to undergo such idiocy as non-competitive ‘sports’ and ‘transgender’ training. A male adapted to such feminist propaganda is scarcely qualified to fornicate, yet alone act like a man.

We like noisy stuff---guns and NASCAR and Bruce Willis movies.

We like to protect stuff---our homes, our women, our children and our nation. Even the most degraded lesbian, if her neighborhood is invaded by 100,000 Chinese soldiers, would rather be defended by a bunch of Oklahoma boys than by the questionable males who inhabit San Francisco and New York.

We respond to words like Honor, Loyalty and Duty. We don’t really get Chastity too well, but here is where real women are needed to teach it to us. We can learn it if you ladies are patient.

We react to fleshy things like food and sex. You ladies, while courting us, should encourage one part of our flesh---the food part---and deny us the other---the sex part---until we marry you. Most modern ‘Sex and the City’ women get this exactly backwards. These poor females end up as well-used and well-divorced skanks, lonely and empty wombed.

We need to be in the wilds with other real men from time to time. Thus our habit of taking trucks, buddies, six-packs and guns into the woods. Do not try and deny this to us. If we did not do this you would love us less---or not at all.

But all of this can really be boiled down to a single sentence. It was spoken by the most complete Man who ever lived. His advice on masculinity was simple:

A man should love the Lord with all his heart.

Everything else is extra credit.

(Hat tip: Sippican Cottage.)

(Update: And since I brought it up, here---in no particular order of importance---is my own list.)

A man should know how to:

Shoot a pistol, prepare meals, handle a manual transmission 4-wheel drive truck, talk to God, clean a home, read and understand history, administer basic emergency medical care, walk ten miles a day with full pack for at least two weeks, set up any tent in any weather, save a drowning man, teach an adolescent about his life and times, read and understand women, handle teenagers in the wilds, work a machete, repair a camp stove, tent, pack and boots while in the woods, run 5 miles, swim one mile and bike 20 miles all without a break, ride a motorcycle, set up and operate computers, explain the purposes of music, literature and art, laugh easily, tell the difference between sham and real, survive alone for days at a time, recover when defeated or lost, cook meals on long trips in the wilderness, handle unexpected encounters with dangerous animals.

I can do all the above, but only a great fool will trust me with hammer, saw and drill.

The Sound of Music

Like every man my age I had a little record player as a lad. I would listen to the ‘top 40’ an the AM radio and do my best to buy the 45 rpm records when they came out. When money permitted I bought as many 33 rpms as I could.

My mother had a collection of classical music albums. From time to time she would play them on my record player. All the usual ‘long hairs’---classical music was called ‘long hair music’ back then---became part of my repertoire.

When I was out of the Air Force in 1975 I had saved up enough money to buy a fine stereo system to play my growing collection of records. It was my first introduction to what is still, 32 years later, an addiction.

Like every esoteric hobby the world of expensive sound reproducing equipment has its own vocabulary, the use of which identifies you with the tribe. ‘Stereo’ is out. Better is ‘high-end audio.’ ‘Music lover’ is out. Better is ‘audiophile.’ ‘Record player’ is out. Audiophiles say ‘turntable.’ There is more, but you get the idea.

The goal of an audiophile is to recreate as much as possible the experience of live music in his home. We tend to forget but for 6500 years all music was live. The wealthy of history would usually have an orchestra on the payroll just as they had butlers and cleaners and maids. Mozart, Bach and Handel had all served wealthy patrons.

It has been only 50 years that the common man could bring pre-recorded music into his home. In the 1950s sound reproduction began to follow two paths, one for consumers and the other for audiophiles. The consumer stereos were very reasonably priced, as befitting a consumer culture. But the audiophile systems had no limit on price and quality. Think Oldsmobile and BMW.

Once one entered the world of high-end audio he quickly realized that everything he knew about listening to music was wrong. Music was not to serve as background, it was to be listened to. As much as his resources allowed an audiophile was expected to have a room just for his music. He would go there only for the express purpose of listening. Furniture and wall coverings were arranged to maximize the reproduction of sound. He was expected to become familiar with technical phrases like ‘imaging’ and ‘sound staging.’ He came to understand words like ‘reference’ and ‘musicality.’

All of this was hideously expensive of course. All hobbies are once one really gets into them. In today’s prices a beginning high-end system would cost $2000. And that is bear bones, entry level simple stuff. And there is really no upper limit. My dream system comes in at a shade under $100,000. Audiophiles commonly invest---that is the proper word---$30,000 in their systems. My current system has cost me around $10,000.

Of what does such a thing consist? We must first get rid of the idea that a system is one or two boxes and a set of cone speakers. No, that will never do. An audiophile system is broken up into pieces. There is nothing called a ‘receiver’---something that has an amplifier, a pre-amplifier and a radio. All parts of an audiophile system are separate. The amplifier is only that. Sometimes a real nut---me, for example---will have two amplifiers, one for each speaker. The pre-amplifier will be (of course) separate from the amp. It will have no tone controls or equalizers---these are anathema! The idea of reproducing sound is to have as little in the way of the music as possible. Anything that disturbs this distorts and confuses the signal.

 How does an audiophile connect all of these? Easy answer: As expensively as he can. Cables have become an industry in themselves. These cost anywhere from $10 a foot to $500 a foot---and up. The idea of cables is to allow the signal to zip through them with as little loss to musicality as possible. This means money---lots of it. I use Kimber cables throughout, the total cost being around $600.

So now we have an amp, a pre-amp and cables. Something missing? Why yes, there is---a source. This is either a CD or a record---referred to from here on as ‘vinyl.’ So allow me to shock you. No audiophile will refer to CDs as high-end audio. Sorry to disappoint, but CDs are really consumer stuff. They take the analogue signal---all those wild markings you see on an oscilloscope---and digitalize them. In other words, an unnecessary layer of distortion has been forced between the pure source and your ears.

But that is not all. Once digitalized the signal must be decoded so that you can hear it---more distortion. Every CD player has two parts, a reader---that thing that spins the laser---and a DAC---a digital-analogue converter. Some crazy audiophiles---me for instance---actually have the CD player broken up into two boxes, the reader and the DAC. (Yes, I know that CDs are not really an audiophile source, but I have one anyway---and a rather expensive one, thank you very much.)

Here is an example of a high-end CD player, the NAD M5 CD SACD.

 And what of vinyl? Ready for some heresy against the common opinions of mankind? Vinyl is far and away superior to CDs. Period. End of debate. (One writer exactly described CDs as 'perfect imperfection,' and vinyl as 'imperfect perfection.') The reason is that vinyl is analogue---a ‘copy.’ In the grooves of a record are carved the exact shape of the sound waves your ears pick up. What you hear is what you get.

How do we get the sound out of those grooves? Easy answer: We spend money. Lots of it. The more money you spend the better able is the turntable to extract the sound from those grooves. Here is an example of an audiophile turntable.

It is a Sumiko model 30. It will set you back $29,000. You read that right---twenty-nine thousand dollars. And that does not include the cartridge, that little thing dangling at the end of the tonearm. That will cost you another $1000. The job of the cartridge is to follow those little grooves exactly. The cartridge moves when they do, up and down, side to side, back and forth.

Finally we have come to speakers. I am completely biased. I prefer the sound of planar speakers over cone speakers. Cones are what everyone is used to. They are made up of---well, cones. These vibrate back and forth to the signal. These can cost up to $30,000. I have Magnepan 3.3 QRs. Here is an example of a magneplanar speaker.

So there you have it, a description of the audiophile world too brief and not nearly technical enough. But after all is said and done, after all that cash has been laid out, what do you have? Simple: You will have in your home the ‘music of the spheres,’ Heaven’s own ethereal tones, a listening experience that is better than you know what. (You had better not explain your habit to your wife in these terms.)

Don’t believe me? Well then just get yourself to your local audiophile dealer. Call first, because like fancy restaurants these places usually require an appointment. Bring in your favorite CD or vinyl. Ask to see a sound room. Sit and listen. Prepare to be transformed. You will hear things in the music you never knew were there. As you sit the system itself will disappear, leaving only the music.

Which is exactly the point, after all.

(You might take a look at the magazines read by audiophiles. Here is one, Stereophile.)

Bloody Apocalypto

Mel Gibson knocked another one out of the park with Apocaplypto. Yes, it was bloody---but it was about the Maya, a culture obsessed with blood and the blood-soaked god, Kulkukan. It was also stunningly beautiful, evocative of the decline and degeneracy of the late Maya era.

Much of the violence of the film was more Aztec than Maya. Truly the Aztecs were the cruelest people in History---and that says a lot. I will write later of them at length, but it is enough to say that they managed during celebrations of their hummingbird god to surpass the killing efficiency of Auschwitz.

There were many rolling heads in Apocalypto. Each unfortunate victim was forced to submit to the knife of a priest and witness his own heart torn out of his body and displayed to a screaming and blood-intoxicated crowd. The unlucky fellow would then be decapitated, the head being tossed down a blood-encrusted temple stairway. This waste of humanity was meant to feed the insensate gods of the Maya pantheon.

Here is an example of such an event, taken from an Aztec drawing.

Gibson actually built an entire Mayan city for his film, including a series of temples where occurred those sacrifices. Such structures can still be seen in Mayan ruins today. Here are some reconstructions from the Russian Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985).

The main temple you see in the film is a reconstruction of this temple at Tikal.

The Maya of Apocalypto were at the end of a long period of decay. They were hundreds of years from their peak of civilization. You see it in the debauched eyes of the Mayan elite who titter and laugh as each victim is slaughtered and dismembered. You hear it in the speeches of the king who tries to convince the people that all is well with the city. But they are dying, and they know it. All the blood is merely an attempt to buy off the gods for a few more sessions of eating, drinking and merriment until the End comes.

And it does come. The last minutes of Apocalypto show Spanish galleons off the coast. The hero of the story, Jaguar Paw, understands what they mean. He chooses to remain in the forest rather than investigate these strange beings who traveled on castles on the sea.

Not that it mattered much. For once the first Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere all native civilizations were doomed. They could not stand against smallpox, against Toledo steel, against Christianity. They had no answer to the vastly superior culture that had invaded their world. All Indian civilizations would eventually succumb and be swept away.

And their contributions to civilization were paltry indeed. The Aztecs gave us chocolate---the word itself is Nahuatl, and is the only word that is the same in every language---the Maya, the concept of zero. And what else? What thing created by Native American civilizations do we use today?

All that killing, all that brutality, all those hearts torn out of living bodies, all that blood---all for nothing. The ruins of their cities are little more than monuments to waste---of time, of people, of civilization.

Of Mice and Men

The fables coming out of Washington have increased dramatically, thus I conclude that an election is near. 

So for whom to vote? But is that the issue, simply voting? Why, about every nation on our miserable little globe runs elections. Ghana votes, Russia votes. Even Saddam ran for office in his salad days. (He won every time, don’t you know?)

There must be more to this freedom thing than just casting a ballot. And there is. It lies in this sublime experiment called ‘America.’ She is unique, one of a kind, a dream made reality that can never be repeated.

In a room in Philadelphia in 1787 a group of men brought their political fantasies into the real world. They created a new nation almost ex nihilo. I say 'almost' because those men had plenty of baggage with them, baggage like the Old and New Testaments and histories of Rome and Greece written by men thousands of years dead.

I said dead not silent. For along with Washington and Franklin and Madison and all the rest stood Plutarch and Livy and Thucydides and Polybius. And of course old Moses was there too, keeping an eye on things. For those who made this nation consulted history’s dead giants at every turn.

After every session the delegates would retire to rooms or taverns with their ancient texts. You can almost hear them as they went through those pages. “What does Aristotle say about tyranny?” “What did the Achaean League do in a similar situation?” “What does Polybius say about the Roman Senate?”

So much did the delegates acknowledge their debt to the ancients that they debated whether to hold sessions while wearing togas.

The result of those four months in Philadelphia is called the United States of America. She is the one and only nation ever thought up in a room and presented to the world as a fait accompli.

More than 200 years later the marvelous experiment is still around. In spite of numerous attempts to destroy her since her conception she has defied all the odds and defeated all her foes.

And now comes around another one of those Novembers when Americans are to go to the polls and vote for this guy or that guy. We are told that it is ‘our duty as Americans’ and to not vote is to be ‘unpatriotic.’

Oh really? If these statements are true then this voting thing must be of supreme importance to the survival of our Republic. Is it?

No. Not these days anyway. A vote for anyone on the ballot is really a statement that the government is legitimate. It is like buying something. You see the price and fork over the cash. No one forces you to do so.

Politicos try to convince us that those who do not vote are at the very least lazy. But perhaps non-voters are just fed up. And they have plenty to be fed up about. That place called Washington seems to many of us so out of touch, so alien, that it has become in all essentials a foreign land with its own name, ‘The Beltway.’

Try this experiment. Choose your favorite politico from any one of the three branches. Now choose at random any of those men from the room in Philadelphia. Compare resumes.

There you have it. The facts stare you in the face. Not one of the movers and shakers who run this nation could hold a candle to any one of those who made this nation. It embarrasses and shames. It is as if a fine and beautiful palace was abandoned by those who designed and built it and became inhabited by mice.

And now these mice demand our support. On what basis? The one and consistent thing that comes out of Washington is contempt---contempt for you and for me. The mice claim our vote but then work to insure that it is meaningless. The one certain occupation of the mice is to use our money to retain office. Power, and nothing else, is their desire.

And there is scarcely any way to rid ourselves of them. They have managed to put in place laws and rules to almost guarantee their re-election, and 97 percent of them succeed. Nothing can pry them out of Washington. The mice have buried into the corridors of power like beetles into dung.

Look how they howled when we tried to restrict the number of terms they could remain in office! Why, it was as if we denying them their birth right to lord it over us for all Eternity.

No matter what the mice do---sodomizing female and male pages, running houses of prostitution, drowning their girlfriends, refusing to uphold our laws, betraying the country, taking bribes on camera, becoming masters of mendacity---the creatures remain in power, there to pass laws and judgment on the rest of us.

And now the mice plead for our vote so they can pretend legitimacy. They do this while standing in places once occupied by Washington and Jefferson.

I end with a question for which I have no answer: Why has our Republic fallen so far since those long ago days in Philadelphia?

De Mortuis Nihil Nisi Bonum

I have no desire to speak ill of the dead---until Castro is found at room temperature. Then all bets are off.

But what of 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin?

I never saw his program outside of a few bits and pieces from Animal Planet. But I most certainly had heard of him. I thought him a little loony, a little crazed, a tremendous showman. What he did was shocking. And dangerous. And who, upon seeing his act, did not secretly wish to do something like that? From the comfort of our living rooms we could be brought as close as we needed to be with the sheer wildness of the non-human world.

There is a bit of Walter Mitty in every man. We take vicarious joy---always from a distance, mind you---from such as Irwin. We would not---we could not---do what he did but we are glad that there are those like him out there in the world.

But still.

I ask this question not from any sort of pleasure at Mother Nature---that bitch red in tooth and claw---getting revenge upon Steve. He had children. He had a wife. He had every reason to live another 30 years to see his children grow into adulthood and to enjoy the great comfort of a wife in his declining days. So why did he continue risking all of this for the sake of smacking around animals that, if they could, would devour him and his family whole?

I do not pretend to have an answer. But I can pretend to understand Irwin---if only a little.

Steve Irwin was a man. A red-blooded type full of passion and intensity. Had he been born in the 19th century he would have gone exploring in Africa, looking for the source of the Nile. Or perhaps tried to be the first to ascend Everest or reach the poles.

To put it bluntly Irwin was born too late. He lived in an age when most of our world has been mapped and McDonald. Adventure---the real thing, going out in some wild and weird clime where no man has gone before---is hard to come by these days. Irwin had to find his place in such a world---and he did.

We cannot now ask him the question that so many would ask him: Was it worth it all? Was it worth risking life and limb and family again and again to enter the Wild Kingdom?

The Greeks say that when Odysseus entered Hades he encountered the shade of Achilles. Odysseus greeted him as 'blessed in life, blessed in death.' Achilles would have none of that. He answered that he would rather be a slave than be dead. Achilles had chosen a short life full of glory rather than a long life rich with family but doomed to anonymity. He regretted--alas, too late---such a surrender to worldly aclaim.

A student of mine once had a t-shirt with this:

Pain is fleeting. Glory is forever.

Not so. The opposite is the case. And we hope that the Christians are right, that sometimes Glory can be forever. But we will see. We all will see.

I give this piece of advice to my students---especially to the young males:

If you have the hunger to climb, to venture out, to go beyond the limits of most men, for God's sake and that of the family you will one day have, do it while young and single. For if you are called to pay that dear price extracted for such things, the suffering of those you leave behind will be less.

So Steve, requiescat in pace. Our Fallen world needs your type of man. But not a lot of them.