The Spoils of War

The dread headache comes and goes, I’m wondering if it is this CRT screen or a sinus infection . There’s a residual pain where the headache drove its flag, as on Everest. “How’s your head , Mom?” he says, stumbling around, hair askew, lanky, though his Adam’s apple has begun to recede to normal proportions and his face is clearing thanks to some mail-order zit-killer. I no longer see the face of his progenitor in his, not for years- one that was structurally sound, but because of being orphaned, abuse in foster care, drugs, alcohol, eventually twisted into something rabid, accompanied by surly overtly upright bouncing gait of the working-class disenfranchised . I’ve managed to see my own face in my sons, the Josef Kramer-esque heavy browed stop-sign face 50 % DNA softened, he is becoming a man and a new animal. I have faith his intelligence, ambition, sense of perfection , anti-drug conviction, and the love and guidance he has received from all of our extended family helping to take care of him, each of us ended up specializing in this or that aspect of his raising, I am hoping this will help him avoid the worst traits of his particular Y chromosome.

These days , it’s not really hip to care about White Males, young or otherwise, unless they are in a box with an American flag draped over it, or killing Iraqis. The pendulum has swung and now it is not only considered undesirable to have your own kids, but to have a male child is not considered the big deal it once was- there’s no inheritance/land/title/power to hand down in many cases, there’s no family business so having another one of yourself of either gender, but especially male- is selfishly and uselessly redundant, while ‘luxury condos’ are not. You should be saving a female child in China from being aborted or left out to die in rice fields, or saving an African infant from genital mutilation and starvation. Giving birth to another White Male is ‘part of the problem’ to these Self-hate promoters of War, MTV, Meth Music, Rainbow EMO Fruity -Wuss Pebbles.

Was it the 80’s or 90’s when the concern over female children’s self-esteem became popular ? Books like Ophelia’s Daughters first of off floor of Oprah’s set, then off bookstore shelves. Cannot remember much being said about boys self-esteem. During that era , boys were the problem. The complaints were that teachers call on boys more often and boys get to talk more .Boys were better at science and math and somehow that was a conspiracy and someone’s fault. Waitresses and service staff address men first and look at them , but not at women and that was a slight to women, or even a minority who happened to not get addressed first, or get looked at . I was trained while young not to look men directly in the eye/face, my father said that doing so is taken as an invitation, that it was making oneself vulnerable to them, and if I didn’t do it I’d be safer. Though I wasn’t sure what he meant and asked what he meant by an ‘invitation’ , I trusted him when he said “an invitation to hurt you”.One culture may think it is stuck up and anti-social or even ‘racist’ to not look someone in the face or stare into their eyes, another raises their daughters not to do so to protect them.

There have been a few books about boys in recent years,some of which I have checked out since they were inevitably doomed to end up in the library throwaway/sale rack which I peruse frequently , and they did. Many were all about encouraging boys to be ..well, unboylike .Possibly these types of books did more harm than good- Some of these were basically manuals on how to encourage boys to be more like girls usually are. That’s like telling a dirt bike to be more like a cabriolet. The amount written for the masses about how males develop in a strong and healthy way is minuscule and irrelevant compared to the plethora of books encouraging Girl Power – and even that has creepily been co-opted by the myspace.TV/cartoon people, turning it into Girlz and Bratz, and Gurlz- sassy, skanky, Neo-Bratz Feminists. The idea being that Gurl Power can’t happen if boys are masculine, if boys have power. Oh, and the logical fallacy that Gurlz never had power before books and TV and feminism. That Gurlz can only be ‘anything they want, whee!’ when boys get out of the way and shut up. Then Gurlz get older, and whine about men who don’t want to grow up and be Men, when the BoyZ are now being told that it is great to be a teenager forever, and playing video games, skateboarding and wearing ones pants, wigger-style around ones knees is the thing to do. Boys can’t have anything for themselves anymore, if they do, it is being mean and sexist, and probably exploiting or oppressing someone in the process.

I happen to believe that although men do learn lots of things through women, they then share this with other men, SANS women, and thereby teach each other. Like water going through a charcoal filter. Whenever anyone these days speaks about men teaching other men, out come the Socrates and little boys, and stag films, and girlie clubs, as if that pretty much says it all. Well, no, there was that whole feminist/jobs/glass ceiling/secret work cadres. Men could have nothing of their own, especially Evil White Men. Anything where White People are gathering is Certainly Plotting Something Wicked. Maybe that is why they are ditching all these perfectly good books at the libraries, perfectly good readers that I was brought up on, stories, fairy tales- all kaput, except for my growing collection that is. Back to the tree house, the logical fallacy that, if women aren’t there , among the Bohemians in the Grove, that means they are ‘forced back to the kitchens’ . Can’t we let the boys have something to call their own? Men can’t take what we give them and hash it out among themselves if we never let them. They love us because we are not them, not in spite of the fact. Get it? That lame stuff some men say about wanting a buddy they can screw, that is part of their new castrati mental status, which is much worse off than ancient Greece or stag clubs.

I try to test my anti-buddy stance, to see if it is ‘not you, but me’ , that something is indeed wrong with me because I do not wish to be a ‘buddy’, perhaps cannot be a ‘buddy’. Like the practice of calling ones parents by their first names,it creeps me out. This kind of nonsense is another branch of the equality tree, which continues to drop more logical fallacy fruit. If you don’t have an egalitarian relationship, it’s bad. Men are not men, parents are not parents. white is not white, we are all just whatever we invent ourselves to be, and we can cast off the oppressive mantel of our unfortunate birth and fly free. When I was a kid and watched Sesame Street and heard those annoying puppets singing about “you can be anything you want, la de da”, I knew it was crap . I knew I was never going to be an astronaut or a bounty hunter or a basketball player or an astrophysicist . OK so maybe I didn’t know what bounty hunters or astrophysicists were then, but I knew certain facts. I couldn’t be a boy, a daddy or a man, a cowboy, a fireman, a policeman, etc., and I didn’t want to be anyway, even if there were firepersons or police persons or cow persons. John Wayne is cool, Jane Wayne is butch.

So, I do my best to undo whatever school and TV tries to do, we play the game of recognizing BS in mass media, everything from TV to magazines to custom license plates, we look at , examine for signs of poop culture , and dispense with. They are getting so good at seeing this stuff they now point it out to me. So check it out, Reality Deniers, we’ve got your number. Every day I work with not only my own kids but others as well , to get them to see the difference between Real and B.S. in daily life. That is a much stronger concept to teach than ‘this certain thing is a lie, that certain thing doesn’t make sense’. Critical thinking skills will destroy the whole White Male Guilt Trip Industry.

So I talk to my son about how he is part of a doubly unprotected group, that of the White Male, and even worse, the Intelligent White Male, privileged Grey matter , as it were . We talk about all these catch phrases like ‘level playing field’ and ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ and ‘hate’. I teach both my boys about aggression and self-control, and that not all aggression is a bad thing. Niceness isn’t required and in others it is only a skill. Niceness does not equal Goodness. I teach them that contrary to the movies on the Ovulation Channel, the opposite of being a violent, crazed assh*le is not being an emo-f*g. You can be masculine and not be a psycho or a posturing jock. In fact being masculine will help you NOT to be a psycho, contrary to what pop crapture would have one believe. I teach them to be confident and about freedom, and not the kind of freedom that the corrupt govt is trying to get them to believe in so they can die. The kind of freedom to go after what they want , and if that measn work, or school or business, whatever it is, but I certainly warn them about the forces working against them, and how the new system will try and make them feel bad about themselves and guilt trip them endlessly, because they are White Males.

What words actually mean and how they have been co-opted by the Marxian/Fasco-Liberal/ Equality-Enforcers, and how pretend equality is just that. Pretend, bestowed equality isn’t even, as a crazy friend of my parents who followed EST guru Werner Erhard would say ‘ a value judgment’ . This or that group is not inherently bad because they have not caught-up- we have to recognize that we cannot write a patch , like Microsoft does to fix these things,that these magical programs aren’t yielding fruit, we have to “own that”, which is Erhard-speak for accept or face facts, admit a truth. I asked this guy when I was like 8 or so, “you need someone to tell you to do that? Your mom didn’t tell you that?” The adults had a good laugh over this, which pissed me off as I thought they were laughing at me.

He asks me how can people deal with the fact that they are being let in, but actually ‘faking it’? I tell him it is natural for people to want more that what they have, to want to be more, know more- aspirations, competition, but to get there on talent or merit is not always possible on an unadjusted , real playing field. Having to make laws to let people in , make things easier is against natural selection, where the cream rises to the the top. This concept of the playing field is not fairness. Fairness would be doing the best you can, period, win some , lose some. There are plenty of people who could use some help, they just aren’t deemed worthy of help. A huge problem is there’s no in-between help. You either are almost third world and you get everything free or you are one of the working diogs who is taxed to death who funds the whole system, or you are so rich you don’t care. The hard truth is that we aren’t all equally good at stuff, yes, even among white people, take affirmative action, race or social justice whatever out of it. Just a fact, even when you control for age, socio-economic backgrounds, age, education, someone is going to be naturally more gifted than you, and some will be less. I tell him that in the old days, it was a contest of not exactly but close to equals, and you would get super-quality out of it. The let everyone in, give everyone a chance mentality lowers the bar, stops excellence and advancement in its tracks.

The Give Everyone a Chance , and not through merit- those people want to believe that we are all inherently handed the same gifts and flaws, only this or that group just hasn’t been given a foot in the door. Thousands of years of civilization, culture and evolution don’t count for jack to those people, and even if they acknowledge that truth, hey think they are magic, that they can invent magical programs to somehow inject those hundreds of thousands of years of culture, evolution and civilization into other groups, when we know that is not something that happens overnight. Seriously, how does one capture people in the wild, used to hunting and gathering to sustain life, engaged in tribal warfare, enslave them , free them, then expect them to assimilate into 9-5 , Wal-mart consuming drones/worker bees? Or worse, expect them to become molecular scientists? Are we insane?

So I tell my own boys, you DON’T have to save the world. Save yourselves first, because they are after you. I tell them I will throw myself in the road to protect them, but they also have to learn to protect themselves and sniff out when danger is afoot, to teach them to pick up when messages, however covertly are being put across that they should hate themselves for being the Eternally Evil White Man, doomed to CondemNation forevermore. I teach them about when you do something wrong, you make up for it, you make your restitution, but you do NOT destroy everything in place because of it. We talked about this and slavery using legos and lego people as teaching tools. My almost grown son observing this prob got as much out of it as the little one. “See, we made a very bad mistake here, but we don’t put all the legos in the blender or throw them in a bowl, or melt them all together to fix it, do we? No, that would be dumb and make things worse. What if we gave these legos their own area and let them decide best how to live? What do you think of that? What if they decided that we werent so great after all , and went back over here where they started? what do you think of that?”

Friday night he presses my head and holds me as I cried from the pain in my head and showed me funny videos of people blowing up things in microwaves, Tesla coils, some guy eating dry ice- explains that plasma is the 4th stage of the breakdown of gas, solid, liquid. It is clear that he doesn’t care if I understand all his science talk, he just wants someone to tell it to. I’m finally getting that this is his way of loving me, showing me things he knows, inundating me with endless stores of recorded knowledge and things he creates. This late morning, he tells me I could have a brain tumor and that would explain a lot. Then he hugs me. Not wanting to say anything that could be interpreted as crazy, I hug him back and say gently, ” Oh my sweetie, that is so rare and unlikely, don’t worry for me”, to which he replies. “I know that. I’m not worried. Just saying, it’s a possibility,” then wanders off.

To be continued …just going to make a part II on a separate post working on now , will go in the rants/blogroll with the rest