Male Of The Species

I was raised, like most civilized males, to respect social mores and keep certain talk to certain places.  I should be clear that certain talk was not forbidden, as it is a fundamental part of being male, but that the proper places and occasions for such talk were limited so as not to offend more delicate ears.

Despite decades of effort on the part of the PC (politically correct) Police, males - thankfully - are still males.  It is a function of the Y-chromosome and no amount of whining and ear-plugging will ever change that.  Gender roles are as much a function of genetics as environment.

When I was growing up, I was taught by other men that certain conversations were to be had only around other men and only in certain places, such as the locker room, the golf course, hunting trips, and bars (in proper society women were escorted to "lounges" never bars).  I will catch all kinds of crap from the feminists and PC Police, but I see nothing wrong with Standard Male Bragging (SMB), in the proper context.

I am painfully aware that there has been a multi-decadal war on males.  Ritalin (the drug) is primarily used to control male behavior, since kids aren't allowed to play real games anymore, and have a metric tonne of energy to blow off one way or another.  Males and male behavior have been consistently demeaned and belittled, and any signs of it have been drugged and castigated until most males now are just sick to death of it.

If you have any questions why Donald Trump has risen so fast in the political arena, it is because he is unapologetically male.  He speaks directly.  He likes attractive women on his arm.  He knows wealth and power are aphrodisiacs.  His only mistake was apologizing for the Trump Tapes.  It is the traitorous weasel who recorded that conversation and saved it for 11 years that ought to be castrated and hung out to dry.  Trump was well within his male rights to speak the way he did among other males in the locker room context.  That is what we males are all taught.

Women and children have the right to demand that men keep their baser behavior controlled and contained, but no one can demand that we deny our very nature.  Nature created men to amass wealth and power so as to attract the most desirable mates, just as it created women to primp and preen and seek out the wealthy and powerful men.  There is no apology for expressing our Natures, so long as it appropriate to the time and place, and the locker room is definitely the time and place for men to be men.

It strikes me as rather conspicuous that the number of wars in process or about to start are a direct consequence of denying men the right and ability to "blow off steam."  And frankly, doing things like allowing transvestites into the military and striking the word "man" off of all the ranks and titles is even further pushing men into a fight.  Furthermore, blasting men-talk all over Creation that was said in the appropriate time and place is yet another sick and depraved attack on all men, not just one or two.

To my admittedly and unapologetically male mind, Trump is not wrong, the media are.  They knew the context of the talk.  They knew full well that they do the same thing.  They knowingly and hypocritically violated a social trust in a way that deserves the most vile reprehension possible.

What's really strange about all of this is that the popular media (TeeVee, Moovies, etc.) are absolutely awash with foul language and chest-beating males - reference any Marvel Moovie - yet the minute a male gets off the couch or leaves the cinema, he is battered and bashed from all sides for daring to imitate the behavior he just witnessed those "cultural heroes" performing.  It's no wonder males are acting out in so many inappropriate ways; they are receiving severely disconnected messages from society and the cognitive dissonance is driving them batty.

Even I experience massive amounts of cognitive dissonance.  On the one hand, my Inner Male cheers when people like Trump ignore the Whining Class and act like a real male.  If for no other reason, I secretly hope he gets elected, even though my Inner Intellectual is reviled by his complete lack of historical context.  Plainly, you can see my dilemma.  My mental and physical selves are in constant battle over whether love the guy or run in horror.

I truly wish that America could produce a figure like Putin, and it's no wonder he is admired around the world.  He is a Man's Man: intelligent, mannered, witty, wily, erudite, and is a formidable verbal sparring partner.  In the real world outside the molly-coddled nanny states of US and EU, real men still exist and still admire other real men.  In fact, I suspect that Hillary et al. vilify him for this very reason - he is a fine expression of the Real Man.

If Trump has had one major victory, it is on the PC front.  He has put a large dent in the effort to destroy the male.  He is unabashed and proudly male, and for that I salute him.  In the darkest recesses of my inner-most thoughts, I secretly hope he wins, if for no other reason than to put a sock in the mouth of Political Correctness.

I fear it is too little too late, though.  The damage has been done and there are generations of Western males who will never recover, and it will take generations again to repair the damage done by the Progressives and Feminists.

But I can celebrate small victories, and having the Trump Tapes fly back in the face of the PC Police is one of them.  I imagine that Trump and his sons are in the locker room now, clapping each other on the back and laughing at the silly hypocrites in LaLaLand.

And honestly, I'm willing to bet that Real Women admire Real Men, and thus the species goes on.

In the immortal words of Blue Swede, "Ugga chacka, ugga ugga ugga chacka!"

Fungal Monday

Ever have one of those days where you feel like you've done pretty much all you're going to get done and everything from this point on will be anti-climactic?  Yeah, me neither.

Don't know what I did right, but for the past week, Russia has been lighting up like a Christmas tree.  We've been getting about 1,000 hits a day from there, in addition to the regular traffic.  And there's no rhyme to the hits.  It's like folks are randomly reading the entire archive...which is fine.  About time someone did.  I figure it's the CIA using Tor to pop out in Moscow to cover their tracks.  Makes me feel important.  But, to all our new friends in Russia: Добро пожаловат!

At any rate, been a busy weekend, what with shooters and bombers and the Indonesian National Police knocking off the Number One Most Wanted Guy Around Here (NOMWGA).  As usual (here or anywhere else), this has little effect on controlling terrorism.

See?  The fundamental flaw in the War on Terror is that every time you get one, two more spring up because all this whole mess achieves is pissing off more people.

Look at the States.  First, they ban drugs, so that creates a blackmarket, which increases prices and attracts more unwanted types, who start fighting the law enforcement, so the cops get military style weapons and training, so the the bad guys do too, which makes the cop twitchy and start killing folks, who get pissed off and start killing cops.

It's all just one endless circle.  Violence begets violence, one smart guy once said.  The more you piss in someone's Wheaties, the more they want to poop in your garden.  You get nastier, so they get meaner.  You up the ante, so they raise the stakes.  All of these Warons (copyright and registered) will eventually lead to complete collapse, and at this point, I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing.

One thing I am absolutely sure of is that someone is making a fortune off all this mess.  In the West, they say, "Order out of chaos," and in the East they say, "Opportunity in chaos."  Pretty much the same thing.  Stir up some shit and then sit back and invest in the outcome.

In the end, we are all to blame for it since we buy into it.  We obey authority.  We bow to governments.  We swallow our pride and dignity to serve corporations.  Worst of all, we consume the society that was created for us, and it was created for us because on an individual level, I don't know anyone who wants all this crap.

And so we come to the axiom that a person is smart, but people are stupid.

We've all been conditioned to turn to authority figures any time life gets out of hand.  The problem is that those same authority figures are the one causing life to get out of hand.  The result is that we increasingly depend on authority to save us from...in effect, authority.

What's worse is that we have been further conditioned to call anyone who sees this particular insanity "conspiracy theorists," even though just a brief read of history tells us that pretty much all of history is one big conspiracy.

Like mushrooms, the visible caps are just a tiny part of the organism.  Beneath the soil are massive networks of interconnecting filaments that ultimately create a network of seemingly unrelated items.  I call this the Fungal Theory of History (FTH), and we are the ones being kept in the dark and fed shit.

In the rich loam of society, the tendrils of FTH spread out and suck nutrients out of each of us.  The FTH has no chlorophyll and depends on decay and rot to feed its massive network.

I am afraid that the only way to rid the Earth of this subterranean infestation is to completely uproot society.  The more we fight and kill, the more rot and decay we create to feed the fungus.  We must remove the food source - move into the light where fungus is scorched and dies.  Without the shadow and the rot, fungus cannot survive, since it cannot convert light into food.

Where I lose hope is that uprooting involves some pain.  There won't be any more TeeVee or PokemonGo sucking our life-force out of us, but only by disconnecting from this digital infestation can we hope to rid our world of this slimy parasite.  However, looking around, I see little will to do the necessary.  Folks are pretty happy handing their lives over, it seems.

I'm not a Neo-Luddite and I think the internet is the greatest learning tool every devised by humans, but the Fungus is working overtime to distract us from realizing the incredible promise that is literally at our fingertips.

I am afraid that the whole thing must come to a crashing halt.  There doesn't seem to be a way out otherwise.  One could, say, buy a huge ranch and set it up under a set of rules that are written into the deed restrictions, but that violates my love of free will and sovereign ownership.  However, I am unable to think of another way to demonstrate the benefits of complete freedom from the FTH and the "authoritarian" mentality.  It is so completely bound into society and culture now, and the "education" system has robbed us of the ability to think independently.

So on this fatalistic Monday, I pull back from the Fungus and wonder what the result will be of this infestation.  In the end, by the time we figure out what's happening, we are old and the young folks have been taught to dismiss us.  By the time they are old and realize we were right, then their kids won't be listening.

It's a vicious circle...kind of like a Fairy Ring.

Weaponizing Heroes

Whatever happened to the hero?  This word 'hero' and the idea it represents have been so watered down as to be not only meaningless, but to have even negative connotations.

Joseph Campbell probably best summarized the classic hero in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

The hero was an individual to be admired and emulated in spirit.  The hero overcomes personal limitations and supernatural forces to achieve some goal that benefits the rest of us at great personal cost the hero.

In our age, the hero has been destroyed in what appears to be a deliberate and systematic manner.  The media and cultural gatekeepers throughout the 20th century and into the 21st have continually set up 'heroes', only to turn around and shoot them down.  There is an agenda to destroy the classic hero to prevent us from striving for great achievements.

One ubiquitous method of destroying the classic hero is the media-induced worship of sports figures.  These figures are constantly marched out in front of us and we are encouraged to emulate them.  Then they are shot down and their public images trashed.  This, in turn, causes those who grant these individuals hero status to question themselves and to be increasingly wary of all heroes.

In Pavlovian style,  we are trained repeatedly to reject heroes and  deride them for their personal short-comings.  In fact, the classic heroes were in part admired because they overcame their personal faults to achieve greatness.  Eventually, we are trained that humans are incapable of becoming heroes and that we should just wallow in our weaknesses and forget the idea of rising above our natures.

Three prime examples from recent pop culture are O. J. Simpson, Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong.  First of all, none of them achieved anything approaching the classical hero status.  They did not enter supernatural realms, did not achieve amazing victories, and nothing they did gave them a special power to grant favors or blessings on others.

All three were instead set up as modern heroes by our media culture based solely on their genetic dispositions that gave them physical prowess.  After being set up, though, they were summarily trashed sending a psychological shock through those who held them in high esteem. 

Simpson was brought down by murder charges and he was shown in dramatic fashion on global TeeVee to be a coward.  His reputation as an athletic hero who braved grave physical harm to bring victory to his team was shown to be false as he ran from his greatest challenge.  Even though he was acquitted, no one would believe his innocence after that, since he showed his cowardice so publically via the media.

Woods was hardly an athlete.  Golf is not exactly the most demanding of physical activities, especially when someone else carries your bag and you use a cart to zip from one arena to the next.  Nevertheless, he was built up to hero status primarily for being a black competitor in a sport dominated by white upper-class executives.  His very public downfall was based simply on his extramarital dalliances, something hardly shocking in any age with people of wealth and influence.  Again, the same media that had created his hero status turned and devoured him.

Armstrong was another media darling.  His hero status was created not only by his prowess as a bicycler, but by his personal fight against cancer and eventual 'resurrection' to be a strong competitor once again.  Almost as fast as the media 'resurrected' him, they ate him alive for doing what any strong competitor would do: seek an edge over the competition.  This sort of thing goes on in every level of society, yet Armstrong was brought down by it.

All three of these cases highlight a pattern.  It is easy to see an agenda within the media to build up these modern heroes and then crush them as a means of implanting psychological defeatism in the minds of those who buy into this form of worship.  It is done repeatedly with athletes, movie stars, business and political leaders, and military heroes.  We are enticed to emulate then castigate these individuals over and over again.

The long-term effect of this pattern is to destroy the hero as an inspiration to achieve great deeds.  Either we are made to hopeless or to fear our impulse to rise above ourselves in altruistic fashion. 

We know this pattern exists because we can also see its opposite in the same media.  President Franklin Roosevelt was wheelchair-bound due to childhood polio, yet the media went out of their way, then and now, to hide the fact in order to not reduce the man's hero status.  President Kennedy's extramarital dalliances are somewhat legendary, though there is no attempt to bring down the man because of them.  Why?

Because it serves a greater psychological purpose to build up these men to hero status.  In FDR's case, because the media do not want to tarnish in any way the socialist reforms introduced by that administration.  In the case of JFK, it is because of the psychological shock value of assassinating a hero.  All of these cases spotlight a deeper agenda in the media's ability to create and destroy heroes.

Furthermore, we can ask how much of a role did media adulation play in creating the stresses that led to the hero's downfall?  Would Armstrong have felt the need to use steroids to gain a competitive edge if the media had not placed so much pressure on him to achieve?  Would Woods have felt empowered enough to seek the extramarital company of high-profile women without his special status?  Would Simpson have felt compelled to run if he didn't have a privileged status to protect?  Did the media attention itself actually pressure these men, or give them license, to create their own downfall?

In any case, it seems fairly obvious that there is an agenda to destroy cultural icons in order to undermine the strength and cohesiveness of social bonds.  According to Campbell, there is an understood contract between heroes and their societies that bestows benefits on everyone through the process of heroism.  These psychological benefits are severely undermined by destroying the hero.  It takes away our collective strength and feelings of goodness and righteousness.

When the hero is destroyed by his own humanity, then we all feel as if there is no point to strive for greatness.  Instead of trying to rise above our mundane existence, we instead wallow in our hopelessness.  And what could better serve the agendas of controlling elites than to take the moral high ground out from under society at large?  There would be no call to rise against injustice if we believe that our reputations would only be destroyed in the end by some personal foible.

Hero worship of any kind is a precarious thing in any case, but it is especially dangerous when the heroes are selected for us, and then destroyed in front of us, by a voracious and deeply manipulated media.  Those who control the media are able to manipulate cultural archetypes at the most profound levels of our individual and collective subconscious.

Efforts to debase the hero image, undermine the father figure, masculinize the female figure, and any number of similar exercises can be repeatedly demonstrated, especially since the dawn of TeeVee.  In destroying our cultural archetypes, the media masters destabilize society and allow them to replace the time-tested underpinnings of our civilization with those of their own creation.  Ultimately, we end up at the mercy of these manipulators without every knowing why, or even that it was done to us.

The power and subtlty of media is the reason why we must be defensive in our consumption of them, and also why we must push to maintain as much diversity in media ownership as possible.  As the media fall into closer and closer hands, so too does the power of the media.

As long as we continue to buy into the false culture created by the powerful media conglomerates, we will continue to be prey to forces most of us hardly understand.  It is up to us to recognize what is being done, how it is being done, and what we can do to counter it.  We must become our own gatekeepers and carefully guard access to our subconscious minds.

The Meaning Of Life?

For some reason, I woke up this morning with Cindy Lauper's "She Bop" running rampant through my brain.  Why in the hell THAT would be assaulting my morning mind, I can't say.  I couldn't shake it.  I immediately set about playing Handel's Water Music to drown out the inane pop anthem.

But it did set me to thinking, which should terrify anyone regularly reading this space.

The 70s and 80s in America were a time of great banality.  The arts had become vast wastelands of mediocrity that served only greed and narcissism.  True, there were stand outs like Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, alond with a handful of superior movies, but they serve as the exceptions that prove the rule.

The era produced such banal fads as Pet Rocks, glam rock and Michael J. Fox.  It was a period that all great societies seem to go through just before they implode and crumble into the dust from which they came.

In pondering how this inevitable trend operates, I came to the conclusion that at some point, major societies reach a point of such affluence and decadence that two things happen: creativity devolves into hacks for hire, and ultimately, no one wants to do the work.

Many (many) moons ago, there was a cartoon in Penthouse magazine that has been etched into my mind, even deeper than Miss June 1984.  It was a six-panel in which an artist starts out making his paintings in a bare single-room flat while wearing rags.  By the final frame, he is surrounded with admirers, wearing the finest togs and his paintings are now nothing more than his signature.

This was a profound commentary on society in general, and the arts in particular.  The rise of self-indulgent art, combined with the complete lack of discerning taste on the part of the public, is the final phase before the crash and burn.  It is as if the culture has reached the point where it has exploited everything it can get its hands on, and has turned on itself in a final desperate attempt to buy up the last dregs of esthetics.

The other side of this is the fact that some amount of wealth and affluence has reached pretty much every level of society.  At this point, everyone wants to be in the leisure class and no one wants to do the work necessary to build and maintain the mundane foundation of the society.

I mentioned Michael J. Fox earlier, and he is a perfect example.  He made a film called "The Secret of My Success," in which he is the proverbial man-on-the-make.  He slick-talks his way into opportunities and ultimately lands in a pile of money.  Now image an entire society of people just like that.  Everyone buys a cheap Armani knock-off and prints up some cards and becomes an entrepreneur without going through the prerequisite steps of becoming an expert in something.

It's at this stage that the entire culture is run by middlemen and brokers.  The problem with that is no one is producing, and eventually, no one is buying, since no one has money from the Big Deals they didn't make.

In the midst of this orgy of lopsided capitalism, folks forget about things like education and manufacturing and producing.  Instead, all creativity is focused and expended on facadism: it all looks like Town and Country magazine on the outside, but on closer inspection one finds that it's all just pirated copies and cheap reproductions.

At some point, all of this leads to an entire generation without prospects or hope.  There is no real business left, and the scraps that remain have so many barriers to entry that they can't possibly surmount them.  They are the seeds of destruction, the impoverished and forgotten that are the by-products of over-hyped lifestyle chasers.  Education has devolved into little more than puffed-up babysitting.  There are no savings or inheritances from the older generations to fertilize them.  There is nothing left that hasn't already been exploited to exhaustion.

What's worse is that they are stuck with the tab for the high living decades that preceded them, and they never even got a taste of the wine and roses.  All that's left of the bowl of cherries are the stems and pits.

And so the inevitable happens.  The decadence turns to decay, and ultimately the entire thing collapses.  What's worse is that the older generations try to cling to the old ways through the use of brute force.  Dictators spring up by popular will or apathy, who try to maintain the illusion of prosperity at the point of a gun.  Finally, basic human instinct kicks in with the overwhelming desire to be left the hell alone.

At this point, the immovable object meets the irresistible force.  In the clash, the remaining infrastructure of society is utterly destroyed, and from these ashes come opportunity and creativity, as people rebuild and rethink.

For ancient Rome, this process took the better part of 1,000 years.  For America, it was only a quarter of that.  China seems hell-bent on achieving it in a single life-time.  The cycle is speeding up at an alarming rate with seemingly no one learning anything new to remediate the problem.  At the same time, it's becoming a global, rather than regional phenomenon.

It's exactly like bacteria in a Petri dish.  The colony expands until the limits of the environment are reached, and then the entire system collapses.

The only solutions anyone seems to come up with are strict rationing and controls, but that simply implies that someone is in charge of the doling out and measuring.  Inevitably, all that happens in this case is that the watchers become mired in corruption and ultimately they start carving off bigger chunks for themselves until they are lamp-posted by the rabble.

It seems like an impossible dream that we, as a species, will learn to restrain ourselves, rather than always looking to a parental authoritarian system to force us into compliance.  We don't appear to have learned a single lesson from the past 20,000 years of experience.  No matter how civil and genteel the society, at some point someone notices others getting a fairer share of the goodies than they are, and it quickly becomes a greedy free-for-all, as soon everyone is scrambling to snatch up a bigger pile of goodies than the next guy.

Sometimes I wonder if our species wasn't exiled to this planet until such time as we had learned to behave ourselves.  If that's the case, then it seems that we are failing miserably, since we are not only not improving, we seem to be back-sliding into the muck.

Perhaps it will take a global collapse of unprecedented proportions for everyone to learn all at once that we are going the wrong way.  In the past, there was always an escape valve; folks could pick up and move somewhere else and start over.  With a global collapse, though, there will be no life unaffected.

Perhaps that is the subconscious origin of the current slavering rush to apocalypse.  Somewhere deep in the collective id, folks are pushing to see the final Big Poop, so that we can start anew, hopefully a bit wiser for the wear.

It does seem, though, that at the end of every Age, there is a massive upheaval that fertilizes the future.  Let's hope that someone is taking really good notes, though, so we can all copy off them before the exam.