Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Rotten Fruit on the Vine

Wow, is their finger not on the pulse of America.

There is a certain stage when we say that a culture is decadent. As in, not necessarily evil, but literally decaying. Who on earth would celebrate this business? Why does wearing one's pants on backwards suddenly indicate the rise of a New Man? Besides, of course, these folks' utter inability to comprehend real masculinity, which has standards beyond the sterile pursuit of pleasure. Not that pursuing pleasure is bad, mind you: the LongSufferingWife would be seriously worried if yours truly didn't take his coffee and research into the tub for an hour and a half sometimes... but REAL men's pleasure is generative. Real men aren't afraid of having kids. And this isn't some divide-and-conquer bullshit about gay vs. straight, or masculine men vs. men god made androgynous, either. Real gay men don't scorn "breeders." They kick ass and take names and run businesses and create art, and all that other jazz, just like regular guys do. Real men's hobbies and pleasures lead to something, give rise to something, create something, or have some purpose more exalting than being an easy synonym for a Philip K. Dick wirehead.

People are naturally generative. We're made for more in life than to experience orgasms and take up space. This bold new manifesto takes sybaritism to a level that begins to resemble Mewling Cabbage more than New Man. People who are not generative in some aspect of their lives are failed human beings. Pity and contempt is all they rate, and the pity portion is only out of a lingering sense of charity and hope that at least some of them will come to their senses.

And the other thing real men do is have the balls to call a spade a spade. We need to get back to using certain terms as the insults they truly are. Virginia, decadent doesn't mean "really good chocolate."

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What utter, unmitigated bullshit. REAL men don't want to have families and be responsible? I thought the point of being a real man was that you grew the hell up, you were responsible for yourself and your loved ones, you accomplished SOMETHING (even if that something is being a dad and teaching your kids right from wrong: you don't HAVE to make lotsa money or win prizes to be successful, and, honestly, I think being a great dad is more important than millions of dollars or awards) and you stopped being self-centered. Face it, at some point in life most people go through a self-centered phase. Then you grow the hell up, become mature and responsible people, and get on with your lives. Unless, of course, you are buying into this garbage, and then you are just taking up space and wasting our air.

Anonymous said...

How infantile!

It's funny, I was just observing to Maddie last week how one of the big signs of having become an adult is that few of your favorite activities are, in the moment, "fun"; they're pursued for their ends, not just to rudderlessly hop from one lily-pad of pleasure to the next. And besides, when was infallibility ever a male virtue? Expertise, experience, sound judgement, sure, but infallibility?? "This is the way the [postmodern] world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

I say it's high time to popularize a new philosophy: neomodernity, wherein the drive to replace the unworkable & the failed is grounded in the preservation of what does work. Oh, wait, that's called "Conservatism". But maybe it'd sell to moonbats under "Neo-Modernity"?

Anonymous said...

I think that would actually sell, Jim; you ought to give it a shot...but it''d have no chance in this corner of the US of A unfortunately. or in my homeland either...France, otoh...

boxingalcibiades said...

It'd have no chance here b/c by and large it's not needed...

boxingalcibiades said...

ugh. got caught by a guy who needed my attention.

although the more Californians move here to downtown Dallas, the more we're going to see that particularly hip and sterile lifestyle continued locally.

Otherwise, locally, where "kick ass" is a synonym for "good," I'm not that worried about it. But words like "Decadent," "ignorant," "pointless" ... these words need to come back into regular speech and be respectable. As opposed to, say, "nuanced" and "gravitas."

Anonymous said...

two words:
skull racks.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I don't know, Jonathon. There's always the value of a negative example in action.

As opposed to, say, muggers, burglars, rapists, and other lower life forms, who should clearly donate their skulls to Posterity...