We have different thoughts about Francis W. Porretto (hat tip again to Gerard) versus Dr. Helen Smith. But they, in turn, are having similar thoughts about manliness and how it is needed when a responsible hand guides the tiller of a ship of state.

A Sunday Rumination at Eternity Road:

Manliness is an indispensable attribute in a captain of State.

Henry VIII of England was tormented by his repeated failures to produce a son. He feared that it was God’s judgment upon him, which he strove to avert by flitting from wife to wife, divorcing the Church in England from the Papacy in the process. He did manage to beget a son, Edward, upon Jane Seymour, but Edward was weak both physically and mentally his entire short life. His “reign” was that of a regency council; he never held nor wielded power before dying of tuberculosis at age sixteen. It was Henry’s second daughter, Elizabeth, born of Anne Boleyn, in whom the strength of the Tudor line was conserved. However, to get from Henry VIII to Elizabeth required England to endure a decade of fratricidal war.

The United States has had several demonstrably unmanly men for chief executives in recent years: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Hussein Obama. Note that all three of these “men:”

* Are whiners;
* Are prone to making excuses;
* Try to shift the blame for their failures and sins to others;
* Admit to error or wrongdoing only when they have no alternative;
* Despite their demonstrable failings, are relentless in criticizing better, more accomplished, more moral men;
* Are implacably hostile to individual freedom.

Note also that none of the three has fathered a son. Whether that was because of a quirk of biology or by Divine intervention, we may be grateful, for none of the three would be more capable of rearing a son to actual manhood than was Henry VIII.
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A manly father will raise his son to an appreciation of personal independence and the obligations it confers. He’ll insist, at every stage of development and under all circumstances, that his son bear the full responsibility for the consequences of his decisions and actions. He protects his son only by limiting his autonomy until the boy has grown old enough and strong enough to bear what it might cost him; apart from that, the enduring theme of the manly father’s lessons to his son is to “take it, whatever it might be, like a man.” For he knows that he won’t be around forever; in due time, his son will have to “take it” whether he chooses to or not.

Dr. Helen would like to engage in some quality thinking about what “success” really is, and whether our flashy politicians raised in fatherless homes have defined it properly before dedicating a lifetime to chasing it down…

Father’s Day is here and it is a time to reflect on how important dads are to us as I do here in a PJTV show on why dads matter.

However, there are people who feel differently. These people think that fathers are not only unimportant but that they might even impede one’s success in life. At least this is what I got out of an article at The Daily Beast entitled “Washington’s Fatherless Elite” in which author Lisa Carver explores why so many successful politicians (such as Obama) and others are from father-free homes:

I was recently helping a graduating senior put together his college applications, and it about killed me. Whenever I began to fret that the forms weren’t filled out absolutely perfectly, he’d just smile roguishly. He wasn’t prompt, he didn’t worry. He knew everything would work out just fine.

“No it won’t!” I wanted to yell. “We have to take into consideration every possible complication! Life is a series of disasters to be narrowly averted!”

The difference between us? One big one is that he grew up with a loving dad to comfort, help, and support him, and I did not. My dad was in and out (more out than in), instilling in me a persisting sense that no help is coming, that life is mine to tackle alone, that finding a solution is completely up to six-, or 16-, or 36-year-old me. And it may be that running a country, a state, or a courtroom in today’s world benefits from exactly this type of survivalist, crisis-oriented personality.

Carver goes on to talk with a politician who grew up without a dad:

I was a man amongst men in the State House of Representatives and was a member of the good ol’ boys club. It fostered a feeling of belonging in the male world. I love my mother dearly, but there are times when a father’s guidance would have served me better. I poured my entire sense of self into becoming a politician on the upswing. I passed over a few opportunities to have made a family. I skipped past moments of simply enjoying my life and obsessively devoted every waking hour with thoughts of how I’d advance to the next level.

I came to understand that I’d substituted a father’s involvement in my life with one deeply entrenched with my political peers.

I see the differential being chased down here, both by Porretto and by Smith, has to do with existing in the world in which one has been hatched — whether that is in the capacity of a spiritual/temporal leader, or of a commoner. The ability present in those raised by strong father figures, and commonly absent in those lacking the same advantage, has to do with duality. Recognizing that certain things “ought” to be a certain way, and yet at the same time, retaining the ability to function in an environment in which the various codes and patterns may not have been upheld.

You see it in the elections here in the United States. Eight and a half years ago we got a President elected who was viscerally disliked by those who resented manhood — many of whom probably never understood a father’s proper role in the family. They shrieked. Now we’ve got a President who offends the rest of us. We don’t shriek…we groan. Both sides have strong feelings about Presidents disliked, but have dramatically different ways of showing this dislike.

The biggest difference lies in the ability, or the lack thereof, to speak thoughtfully of what is to take place if things are done the undesirable way. Their side, with their hostility toward manliness, has become classically European. Words like “must” and “ought” and “should” roll so easily off their effeminate lips. They show a consistent weakness in weighing cost/benefit. The most luminous example of this weakness is the invasion of Iraq, which shouldn’t have happened, of course. “Sovereign nation!” “We invaded a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11!” “Thousands of troops killed!” Yes…and…if we didn’t invade, then what? Cost-benefit. You aren’t supposed to be asking about that, you see. The show’s over. They obligatorily bulged their eyes out of their skulls, they obligatorily flung their spittle around the room, they obligatorily manifested their rage…let the horror commence. Why are you asking questions?

It goes to the fundamental ability to decide things logically. Here’s another example that separates the shemales from the men: Gun control. Good guys and bad guys have guns…versus…just the bad guys have guns. Here’s another one: Minimum wage. Jobs are available that pay five dollars, eight dollars, ten dollars an hour…versus…only the jobs that pay ten dollars are available. The others have been outlawed. Need more? North Korea. We don’t “talk” to The Gargoyle, and he proceeds to build his missiles and other weapons…versus…we ply him with food and oil so that he doesn’t build his missiles and weapons — then he builds his missiles and weapons anyway.

This hostility to maleness consistently and inexorably leads to an inability to see even simple issues from multiple sides. The manliness-deprived just see one side. We don’t invade Iraq so there’s no tough dangerous work for anyone to do…we make guns go away…jobs pay more…Gargoyle becomes a peacenik…what a bunch of wonderful miracles! Too bad they’ve never actually happened, regardless of how many times they’ve been tried.

Their mass personality is well-defined by now. These are the cowardly school principals who, staring across their desks at the chronic bully and the good-kid who finally fought back, resignedly send the bully home and reserve the “real” punishment for the kid who’s supposed to be above the schoolyard fighting. These are the well-intentioned but spineless who demand the harshest justice upon the head of whoever threw the last punch, so that the guy who threw the first one can get away.

Bad fathering, or absent fathering, does that to people. The vacuum left by the absent masculinity, always seems to be filled by the same junk: A surreal Utopian vision of a universe that has never known, and never will know, force. They seek to banish force in all its forms, be it malicious or protective, because they do not understand it. And generation after generation, they become what they hate because they always need more rules to get this Utopian vision going — and no form of force short of the police power of a state, shall suffice for that purpose.

Update: It’s an exercise in great minds thinking alike; blogger friend Rick and I did not coordinate this, you’ll just have to take my word for that.

Compare and contrast.

Update 6/24/09: Welcome, again, Conservative Grapevine readers.

Jaye has thoughts about Man Day, thoughts that’ll get ya thinkin’:

What we’ve got going in the present is insane. It is the present that worries me.

Absolutely, men have been systematically attacked. Every institution supports the pc mentality. Women have readily conformed. Men were more dangerous, perhaps, and so more viciously targeted. The attack on masculinity was one of the things that woke me to how sick our society had become.

The nature of men and women was attacked because it is so fundamental to how we are human together and in relationship to reality. What is being attacked is the very idea that things have an intrinsic reality. If something so fundamental is malleable, can be unanchored from reality, so can everything else. Words can mean anything, gender, sexuality, morality, society, history, same.

We deny nature, say it is not true. So nothing else we know was true, just a social construct, we will make a new one to fit. We are absolutely miserable, but we keep telling the lie until lies become the dominant mode in society not just personal relationships. We will believe that we can spend our way out of debt, that wrong is right and to be celebrated, that we can talk madmen with nukes into liking us. PC is going to kill us.

I don’t want men who do things exactly the way we are supposed to do them. I desperately want men who will do the adult version of jumping off the roof just because it’s there; who get things done, who make the world a better place just for being there, who drive the barbarians from the gates, who write music that leaves you breathless or build things that will leave you awestruck a thousand years from now or get us to the stars. All that is real.

It brings to mind something Vin Suprynowicz said about illegal aliens lately (hat tip to Gerard):

Here in America, citizens and other legal residents have every right to stage rallies, protests and demonstrations on any topic that tickles their fancy.

But they ought to say what they mean. It’s reached the point where some of these characters use so many misleading code words that you need some kind of politically correct secret decoder ring.

And I wonder if the folks who cover such events for our newspapers shouldn’t provide us with a little of that cryptanalysis.

“A coalition of labor, business, faith and immigrant rights leaders gathered in downtown Las Vegas on Monday to launch the local leg of a national campaign pushing reform of America’s immigration laws,” the Review-Journal reported June 2.

“All of us have seen the disastrous effects of this broken (immigration) system, which has enforcement only as its approach,” said Peter Ashman, chairman of Nevada’s chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “The immigration system must be overhauled to create and accommodate a balanced and sensible approach to immigration, one that takes into account our need for secure and orderly borders and protects our integrity as a nation of immigrants.”

By which Mr. Ashman actually meant to say that he now demands we “finish the job of making our borders the least secure in the world, inviting every poor person in the hemisphere to swarm here illegally, thus bankrupting legal immigrants and native-born Americana alike, and if you object I’m going to call you a racist and pretend your forebears broke just as many laws getting here as my clients break every day.”
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Calling these people “undocumented” is meant to create the impression their “documents merely failed to show up in the mail,” a situation easily remedied by filling out a couple pesky forms. That’s like calling a rapist an “insensitive lover” or a bank robber a “customer who makes withdrawals without presenting proper withdrawal slips.”

Reality is scary and unpleasant sometimes. A lot of folks simply are not up to the challenge. Some of them, nevertheless, lust after the kind of power that is involved in running everything. They thirst for the “You’ll Never Work in This Town Again” power. Even though they possess a childlike weakness in dealing with things as they are. And they know it.

A quote often misattributed to Robert Kennedy is “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” Supposedly this captures the liberal progressive spirit of daring to begin labors on what is known to be impossible, and ultimately achieving the impossible. That’s supposed to be the prize; that is bait for the trap. It seems what has been implemented is to dream of things as they never have been, and insist on seeing them that way even when reality continues to counsel that things aren’t really that way.

So many of these impossible things our politically-correct progressive-minded types want to undertake, have very little to do with building things and much more to do with re-defining things. Ballot after ballot after ballot asks us if we want to re-define marriage as something other than a union between a man and a woman, and when we keep saying “no” our courts threaten to step in and re-define it for us. Illegal aliens are re-defined into a class that is somehow supposed to be here. Tea party protesters are re-defined as mindless drones marching in lockstep to an unreasonable set of rules, rather than good-hearted people who are taking time out of their busy lives to speak out against unreasonable rules. President Obama’s decidedly hostile feelings toward the country He’s supposed to be leading, have been re-defined into something called “love.” He’s taking over one industry after another after another, and His solutions are supposed to be “market-based.”

The same people who have some personal beef against manliness, are the people who show a personal beef against reality. Those who spend as much energy re-defining things into something those things aren’t, as what, generations ago, manly men spent on building tunnels, bridges, skyscrapers and dams.

Jaye is on to something here. There is a connection between those who bash reality and those who bash manhood. They do seem to be the same people.

The prophecy:

A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties–the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety–the one which can’t bear to be outside the pale; can’t bear to be in disfavor; can’t endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, “He’s on the right track!” Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his lifelong principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances….

Mr. Clemens was really hardly going out on a limb when he wrote “Corn-Pone Opinions,” an essay not published until well after his demise. But it is a ballsy prophecy nevertheless. You can extend your gratitude to our blogger friend Gerard for the history lesson (he has ours).

Back to the subject at hand: fulfillment of the prophecy. Say hello to the smaller ass.

Meet Steven Gilmore. The wannabe rapper tried to rob a Florida convenience store Friday night and shot an employee in the head with a BB gun in a bid to establish “street cred” for his nascent hip-hop career. The 21-year-old Gilmore…admitted his harebrained scheme after he was arrested Saturday night, according to Gainesville police. Gilmore, who also copped to a stickup of the Hungry Howie’s restaurant, told police that he thought the robberies would provide him the kind of reputation he apparently believes is required in the rap world. According to a Gainesville Police Department report, Gilmore, wearing a bandanna over his face and carrying a BB gun, fled empty-handed from the Super Store convenience outlet after struggling with a store clerk over the weapon. During the encounter, the clerk, Dharmedra Patel, was shot in the temple and suffered a laceration and bleeding. The Hungry Howie’s heist netted Gilmore about $900, records show, and he departed the crime scene on a moped driven by a 16-year-old accomplice. The aspiring rap performer’s career is now on hold as he faces attempted armed robbery and aggravated assault charges.

Prophecy and reality enjoy an overlap that is so perfect, that on reflecting on the two of them, I realize not a single pertinent word has been left unsaid. OUT.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.