Jack Donovan

Young people today have been programmed to “Rage Against the Machine.” The Left has successfully marketed youthful rebellion against “The Man” for decades. One has to wonder, though, how long it will take until today’s budding hipsters -- gussied up in a postmodern hodgepodge of recycled rebellions past -- finally realize that they are the new squares.

“The Man” is now a smooth-talking, b-ball playin’ brother who come up from bein’ a community organizer in the ghetto.  He wants to save the planet, offer healthcare to everyone, punish the greedy, redistribute wealth, and offer a welcoming hand to his working-class Brown brothers from the south. He’s surrounded himself with a rainbow coalition of the choicest minorities.

It’s got to be tough to make it as a real radical lefty these days. You really have to do your research and get out your microscope to find your microaggressions.  You have to go so far left that it feels almost tongue in cheek and goofy, like that awkwardly ironic t-shirt you bought at Urban Outfitters. You have to hold an anti-plastic bag drum circle. It’s not like back in the ‘60s when you could just grow your hair out, get naked and sit around singing and smoking pot in the mud.  And it’s not some wizened old beatnik feeding you communist propaganda; it’s your schoolteacher, your principal, your college professor and your Supreme Court Justices. The future is now, cats, and you can’t fight “The Man” when he’s on your side. You can take to the streets and march, if that’s what you’re into, but your signs might as well say “Yes, sir, more of the same, please!” All you can do is become part of the machine, another cog. Your “rage” is all staged.

Any real resistance, any real rebellion at this point will have to come from the right.

There is growing reason for it. This has not been the people’s revolution. If polls are to be believed and votes are to be counted, the federal government is now behaving more and more like an oligarchy, where a cadre of elites, academics and “experts” decide what’s good for the people. Healthcare reform was passed with waning support, when few even knew what was in the bill. The American people were assured by their irritated masters that they would learn to like it. The State of Arizona, a border state facing a massive influx of illegal immigrants, decided to crack down and enforce the law. A majority of Americans have always supported sensible immigration control and rule of law over free-for-all, but “The Man” stepped in, sued the state and got a judicial decision that hobbled Arizona’s attempt at immigration control before it went into effect.

Most recently, an openly gay federal judge negated the will of a majority of Californians -- 7 million of them -- and decided that the state would recognize same-sex marriages whether the people agreed or not.

As the state progressively abandons the song and dance required to maintain the illusion that America is governed for and by the people, as it stops asking and listening and starts telling, it becomes increasingly illegitimate as a people’s government. At a certain point, it stops being us and starts being them, they, IT.

Andy Nowicki called it when he wrote:

They are the rulers; we are the ruled. They are in control; we aren't.

In fact, they have shown themselves to be openly contemptuous of, even mocking towards, anyone with the audacity to try to stop them from achieving their goals. "Pass all the resolutions you want, suckers!" they sneer, "We'll just send our boys in black to knock 'em down and call 'em 'unconstitutional,' and it'll be back to square one for you bozos!"

Yes, they have the power, and they'll eventually get exactly what they want.

The far Left has been portraying the state as an illegitimate oppressor for years. Until recently, the Right has probably seen itself reflected in the halls of power enough to think of the government as “us,” albeit ever more besieged by usurpers. But the worm has turned and the usurpers have usurped. Again, after Nowicki, “let them have the state” -- withdraw, disengage, ridicule and defy the Other.

What the state does is simply what the state does.

It has long been clear that the list of “rights, benefits and responsibilities” associated with marriage and denied to same-sex couples are beside the point for the majority of same-sex marriage supporters. For many, even a perfect civil union law that replicated those rights, benefits and responsibilities exactly would not be an acceptable compromise, so long as the word marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples. The push for same-sex marriage is emotionally charged and highly symbolic. It’s about a word that equalizes, validates and -- same-sex marriage supporters hope -- confers a sense of collective acceptance that same-sex unions are essentially the same as heterosexual marriages.

But what the state does is simply what the state does.

Those on the Right can withhold social approval and deny that acceptance.  The Right can rebel against the state by resisting socially, by refusing to pretend that this consensus exists, by refusing to give the actions of the state any moral authority.

The general public does this already. Take for example the manufactured consensus on transsexuals.

According to the law of the land in many states, a man who takes female hormones and chooses to live as a woman -- usually but not always with the goal of getting breast implants and having his penis removed -- can legally become a woman.  Likewise, any woman who prefers comfortable shoes can take male hormones, live as a man, and according to the law, become a man. The media will deferentially perpetuate this illusion by referring to her with all of the pronouns normally reserved for men who were born male. Reporters will even report, straight-faced, that a man has given birth.

The state considers Thomas Beatie a man, and the United States Tennis Association allowed Renée Richards to play as a woman, but few people actually accept that a female can truly become a male or vice versa. If you doubt this, imagine an average guy telling his friends and family that he is dating a male-to-female transsexual. “But the state considers her a woman” will not change the fact that in most people’s eyes, that dude is having sex with another dude. A dude with particularly buoyant breasts who is missing a penis -- a dude who looks like a lady -- but a dude all the same.  To the general public, Thomas Beatie is a freakshow, a bearded lady who had a baby. Chaz Bono is just another fat lesbian with a short haircut. The government and the media say one thing, and the rest of us chuckle and believe another.

What the state says is simply what the state says.

Same-sex marriage offers another opportunity to separate what is right from what the state says. Among the various factions and thinkers on the Right, there will be dispute about the place of homosexuals in society and there will competing visions of what is ideal. But I think just about everyone can agree, though sometimes for different reasons, that same-sex marriage is a ridiculous sham and should be treated as such.

And here’s where it comes down to you.

You have the choice either to concede and play along, or you can keep same-sex “marriages” encased in sarcastic quotation marks. I have male associates who refer to male partners as their “husbands” and who consider themselves “married.” I’m not going to indulge that fantasy. As a writer, I don’t refer to MTFs as women, and I won’t refer to some lesbian’s live-in lover as her “wife” -- no matter what the state says.

To restate the old H.L. Mencken zinger, we must respect the other fellow's “marriage,” but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his “husband” is handsome and his adopted children are smart.

“Oh, is that what they’re calling it now?”

In a variation on a current meme for The Baltimore Sun, Andrew L. Yarrow writes:

Thanks to a long-sour economy and radically changed gender roles and expectations, American masculinity has fractured into an "Up in the Air" male and a down-in-the-dumps male. On the one hand, the corporate masculinity of the early 21st century is based largely on a soft power conveyed by money, prestige and education and their corollaries in grooming, clothing and elan. These mostly urban, upper-middle class (to rich) men read their Economists, know their pinot noirs, and speak in politically correct, complete sentences. Working-class, poor, and much middle-class masculinity is defined by declining fortunes and capabilities in school and the labor force (and even the marriage market), feeding gender- and class-based anger. The "angry white man" losers of Bruce Springsteen ballads often react with a politically conservative hypermasculinity, replete with authoritarian and homophobic streaks.[...]

We need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated. Multiple masculine identities are OK, but they can't be ever more molded by an economy of glamorous star running backs and benched, injured second-stringers.

And yet, like Hanna Rosin and others, he can offer no real suggestions as to how we might transform masculinity thus. What sort of second-string, less triumphant, noticeably weaker and obviously less impressive masculine ideal will allow our hearty but aimless working class men to feel good about themselves again? No one can really say, but everyone is certain that average men had better hurry up and get over themselves and stop wanting to be men in the way that their ancestors have always been men since the beginning of recorded history.

One good question to ask when someone like Yarrow asserts the “need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated” is: or else what? 

We need to do this, or else what?

What happens when a huge portion of the male population feels increasingly angry, defeated, dishonored and desperate?

Ask history.

Andrew Brown at The Guardian recently suggested that folks overstate things when they call church leaders and others “misogynists” for refusing to allow female clergy and so forth. Misogyny, much like the word “racism,” is almost always meant to be an accusation of backwards irrationality and hatred.  The dictionary definition, “hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women,” leaves a wide enough berth that almost any reasonable preference for men over women in any situation could be regarded as misogyny. However, there is a huge range between a level-headed concern about the abilities or motivations of a group of people and “hatred” for them. Self-proclaimed feminists, like Amazonian Al Sharptons, frequently leverage the hateful, oppressive and presumably violent connotations of the word misogyny to back their opponents into a corner where all they can do is mutter something apologetic like, “umm…that’s not exactly what I meant to say.”

From the New York Times...

Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?

The problem is that Andrews and Adams joust in a style they call “full contact,” which, while popular in North America, is considered by the rest of the world to be unnecessarily dangerous. It’s a reputation that isn’t helped by the video on YouTube showing the two men describing their many injuries, including the time a lance bruised Andrews’s heart and he nearly died from a pulmonary embolism. (He was back jousting five days after his release from the hospital.)

...

North American- and European-style jousters can spend all day criticizing one another’s style of competition, and they frequently do. The “full contact” jousters find the I.J.L. style froufrou and weak, dismissing their combat as “a sorority pillow fight.” I.J.L. jousters, for their part, portray the full-contact jousters as a bunch of ego-driven braggarts who have substituted brute force for safety, elegance and finesse. They dismiss the Americans’ lumberyard lances as “closet poles,” their armor as looking “like a trash can” and their draft horses as “tractors with four legs.” (Both Hedgecock and the Europeans use swifter draft crosses rather than the full-blooded drafts used by American jousters.)

...

“The sport of jousting is only going to survive in the United States if there is that ferocity in it,” Adams says. “If it’s just a bunch of guys hitting each other with balsa-wood lances, the only people going will be the Renaissance crowd.”

Lurking under the surface of the debate over jousting styles are deeper questions about masculinity itself. “American culture is a certain way,” Nowrick says. “The hubris and the braggadocio about how tough I am, the whole Rocky Balboa thing. But when you go to Europe, there’s a different yardstick by which men are measured.”

And in related news...

Historians locate King Arthur's Round Table

Legend has it that his Knights would gather before battle at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.

In storytelling, artifice and theater are evocative and necessary. In the best case, dramatic storytelling can lift us from the detritus of our mundane little anthills to another realm where we can imagine the pure forms and great ideas that inspire and impart deep wisdom and meaning.

The tragedy of the “post-modern” world of images is that for so many, artifice and theatrical drama have eclipsed the real. In this world of appearances and poses, every costume is disposable and the person is a mere actor, a blank slate, a ravenously hungry, ever- emptying digestive tract that grinds everything into waste.

For the commercial multiculturalist, culture is a folk hat and gender is a pose or “attitude.”  Everything is à la carte. Urban lumberjacks, land-locked surfers and cul-de-sac hip hop. Rabbi chic. Eskimo. Islam. Ferrari. Blue Steel. The ideals that once guided the lives of men are reduced to oily residues that one can splash on and wash off according to mood or occasion. There is no true commitment for the everyday actor, the Homo Californicus. There is only desire and sensation and social approval.

I was walking through a mall yesterday. Malls are always a deluge of stupid, but a window display for this caught my eye.

Why not Eau de “Christianity?”

“Virginity” parfum?

"Allahu Akbar!" an explosive new body spray from AXE?

In a way, it’s all fairly harmless.

But it also struck me as highly symbolic of the marriage of convenience between commercial values and multicultural relativism. Someone can blend together a few essences that smell nice, and then sacralize their fragrance product by giving it a name associated with an idea so powerful that millions of men have died seeking or protecting it. Now, without going to all the trouble, young suburban metrosexuals can squirt themselves with a little “honor” and head out for a night at "da club" with a vague sense of attachment to something beautiful and meaningful. A vague sense of being the kind of man who would stand his ground, protect his reputation, who would fight for a cause or to protect his people.

One of the private challenges for any sort of radical traditionalist seems to be wresting meaning back from the marketplace that degrades it.  

Postmodern consumerism is passive and easy.

Sincerity is subversive.

…and as they increase in years, so they increase in prowess and in skill in the art of arms for peace and for war. And they themselves, through their great zeal and determination, learn the true way to practice the military arts until they, on every occasion, know how to strive toward the most honorable course of action, whether in relation to deeds of arms or in relation to other forms of behavior appropriate to their rank. Then they reflect on, inform themselves, and inquire how to conduct themselves most honorably in all circumstances. They do this quickly and gladly, without waiting for admonitions or exhortations.

 

-- Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry

The first part of this piece, here, discussed Hanna Rosin's recent piece for The Atlantic, titled "The End of Men."

Part II: Shop Class as Soulcraft, "Idiot Work" and Other Observations

We are pre-occupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in the light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.

-- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

As a young man, Matthew B. Crawford developed an interest in repairing automobiles and motorcycles. The son of a physicist, he found that there was a difference between his father’s abstract, theoretical understanding of things and the tacit, real-world knowledge of the experienced gearheads he bumped elbows with at the shop. He worked his way though parts of college as an electrician, and found the work to be both satisfying and mentally engaging.

After picking up a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, he took his place as a “knowledge worker,” writing abstracts-by-formula for a company that indexed scholarly articles. His more esteemed job paid less, and was somehow less mentally engaging. The work lacked integrity, because in his words, it “could not be animated by the goods that were intrinsic to it.” His company produced products (abstracts), but the company was owned by a media conglomerate, and those products were merely a set of numbers in that company’s portfolio of holdings. The quality of the abstract itself didn’t matter; it didn’t really even matter if he understood what he was writing about, and the quantity of abstracts demanded guaranteed that even a smart guy like Crawford could never really be invested in what he was doing. It was busy work, and it encouraged a kind of lackadaisical attitude among his co-workers. One fellow confessed to him that he was doing heroin on the job.

Crawford eventually went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in the history of political thought. He took a high paying job at a Washington, D.C. think tank, and was tasked with coming up with scholarly-sounding arguments that “put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise.” Any honest person with a substantial vocabulary and an aptitude for fancy writing will tell you that it is easier to come up with dazzling bullshit than it is to actually think. (See also: “the art world”)

After five months at the think tank, Crawford quit and opened up his own motorcycle repair shop. An education in the “liberal” arts didn’t lead to anything as freeing as being a man who is directly accountable for the quality of his own work, solving the kinds of problems that can’t simply be talked away. A motorcycle either runs properly or it doesn’t. You end up with the satisfaction of actually having fixed something and the feeling that you earned your fee, or you to take responsibility for your inability to fix it and make it right with the customer.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how work, beginning with manufacturing work but extending to today’s “knowledge work,” has been degraded by a separation between thinking and doing. He offers the example of a nineteenth century wheelwright, whose craft demanded that he know how to select trees and when to fell them, and whose skillfulness and ingenuity was tested by the unique characteristics of each piece of wood. The work was holistic; as he did the work, he had to think about the end product. There was a sense of individual agency in the work, and each wheel he completed was proof of the quality of his labor -- something he could be proud of. However, when the individual craftsman was replaced by factory assembly line, the work could no longer be holistic. The work of one man was separated into processes to be performed by many men, interchangeably. A series of steps that were once challenging and engaging became repetitive drudgery, the performance of a process. The expert, personal, tacit knowledge of the craftsman was replaced, often inadequately, by the documentation of his “process,” and the understanding of the whole was concentrated into the hands of a few who in most cases didn’t actually do the work and understood it only in the abstract. The systemizing of work into process has become the norm, and it applies to white collar work as well.

Under Discussion: WAR, by Sebastian Junger

In WAR, Sebastian Junger notes that while pure objectivity is hard enough to maintain while covering a city council meeting -- let alone in the middle of a war -- he committed himself to writing “honestly” about the American soldiers he lived (and very nearly died) with as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger gives a raw, real, gripping and insightful account of life and death in “The Valley,” but in WAR he never comes across as pretentious, preachy or even particularly political. Instead, Junger aims to get across what it feels like to be a man at war in a place where firefights often happen several times a day.

It is common to see soldiers portrayed as “victims” of war. Even as politicians and the media mechanically display a reverence for combat veterans and speak vaguely about “heroism” and “personal sacrifice,” it is often clear that many are uncomfortable with the idea that there are men who willingly kill for a living. Junger’s take on it is that they kill to keep on living, to stop someone from killing them. But back home many people speak of war as if it is something terrible that happened to soldiers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Junger refreshingly admits that “war is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.” Like Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker (2008), a lot of men apparently end up missing combat when they are sent home.

Alternative Right contributing editior Keith Preston recently did an interview on "Feminism, Women & National-Anarchism" for the National Anarchist Women blog. I try to avoid writing about feminism in-depth here, but readers of Virtus should find Mr. Preston's thoughts on the topic relevant.

A new study from the Masculine Pathology Department of the University of British Columbia has found, as hoped, that traditional “stoic warrior” ideals associated with masculinity contribute to a male suicide rate that is often as much as three times higher than the female suicide rate. Men who are “suffering from depression” appear to be less likely to ask for help than their female counterparts. However, John Ogrodniczuk, who is seeking publicity for the study, offered that men who “had a strong commitment to their families” and who envisioned themselves as protectors and providers were less likely to commit suicide. The positive spin seems to be that those who are trying to steer a depressed man away from suicide should focus on the “protector and provider” ideal -- but it should be noted that this masculine role is hateful to feminists and, according to Hanna Rosin’s recent report, fewer and fewer men will be their family’s “provider.” So that could prove a thorny route.

Men’s rights advocates often use the higher male suicide rate to gain favor with fence sitters who are sympathetic to pleas framed as public health concerns. The coalition currently pushing for academic “male studies” programs (to replace the expressly feminist “men’s studies” programs) cite male suicide rates as a major concern.

If suicide is always bad for society, and “choosing life” is always better for society, then suicide should always be discouraged. But is that really the case?

A Conversation With Arthur from Arthur's Hall of Viking Manliness.

http://arthurshall.com/

Arthur's Hall has been around a while -- covering weightlifting, guns, heavy metal, conservative politics. All of the best things in life, except of course..."To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women." Tell me a bit about how you got started writing and how the site has evolved over the years.

Well obviously Conan's wisdom is something that we should all live by!

When I launched the site, I had no concept that it would become what it has become. Shatner and I just thought it would be funny to post some of my aggressively offensive and terrifically true observations on the Net. It was not long before I had a good following of readers and I quickly came to the realization that there is a latent desire for masculine camaraderie that is sorely lacking in our post-modern emasculated society.

I have worked hard to create a site that represents the true virtues of masculinity while maintaining a level of humor and irreverence.  It is a difficult balance and I have to say I have done a damn good job of making it work.