How About Let's You and Me Steal Their $h*t?

"The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!"

-Paul Revere, circa 2012 A.D.-

I was checking out my weekly pseudo-intellectual guilty pleasure, The Economist, and noticed that recently something rather significant had taken place in the pages of that publication. The magazine, in it's January 28th/February 3rd 2012 edition, began featuring a section on China--instead of just including them in the Asia section. Big deal, right? No, really, it is. The last time they did something like this was in 1941, to begin a section for The United States of America.

But really, this is no revelation to most of us. We've been reading about how we're fat, dumb, and happy, and how China is going to clean our clock in the 21st century. In lots of the public discourse, it seems we're already waving the white flag and just trying to figure out a way to manage our imminent decline.

Well, waaah. Let me just lay down and hand all my crap over to them. Yeah, right.

That's bogus and that's "small ball." For one, there are many reasons to doubt that Chinese dominance of the near future is inevitable (and I'll reserve these for another column at a later date). In fact, in the crazy world we live in, you should be as a default stance dubious about any stated inevitability that you may hear from any source. But the most important thing to keep in mind is we have a moral imperative to perform, because our way of life and the values we hold dear are worth protecting and perpetuating.

This is truly a scenario where the best defense is a good offense. Instead of sitting around, crying in our beer and quaking in our boots, why don't we steal from them things much much more important than anything they could ever steal from us.

I'm talking about moving away from the mistaken notion that China has nothing to teach us. Theirs is a rich culture. Whereas the US has been together as a coherent political unit for over 200 years, China has existed as such for over two thousand. Compared to us, everything that could happen to them has happened, and in studying their history we can learn plenty about what to do, what not to do, what works, and what doesn't.

I've been in love with classical Chinese culture ever since my late teens, and I expect to be studying China's history and philosophies until the day I die and to never ever run out of new interesting facts and concepts to learn.

I can tell you that the things that make the Han Chinese a great people are customs, traditions, behaviors, and habits of mind that could take root on American soil and likely, with some work and special attention, be adapted to make wonderful things happen here. Along with fatherhood and culture in general, this is a topic that I'll be visiting time and time again in my weeklies. In particular, here are three crucial areas where the cultural artifacts and history of the Chinese people have much guidance to offer:

1) Confucianism--ask your average Joe about Confucius and he'll get cute and spout off about fortune cookies and "Kung Fu Theatre" commercial break segues ("Confucius say..."). And that is incredibly sad, because studying the philosophies of Confucius and his disciples, particularly Mengzi and Xunzi, but also the later Neo-Confucian syncretists, can add meaning to your life and teach you a great deal about how to be a fully realized human being.

I've got a few future columns on this coming, so I won't steal my own thunder, but to wit, the basics: Kongfuzi (i.e., Confucius) was a dedicated scholar who worked diligently to preserve and interpret his culture's key texts and traditions. (That many of the classical texts survive in some recognizable coherent form is due in a great part to him.) The central problem that consumed him, as it did all of the philosophers of The Warring States era (475-221 BCE), was how could one, or many, behave in such a way that would produce a stable social order. Do we not all wrestle with this question in some form or another? For the most part, the answers he came up with dealt with one's obligations to other men and existing social institutions, and also the never-ending task of self-cultivation, of making yourself better through seeking out knowledge and using introspection and will to reform your own character.

2) Taoism--Pronounced "Dow-ism." Over the centuries, any self-sustaining culture collects folk traditions. The folk traditions of the Chinese are collected in a philosophy called Daoism. Translated texts give us insight into a Western interpretation of it, Taoism. (I'll explain the rationale for this distinction in a later column, trust me; just roll with me for now. ) So you'd think that "the collected folk traditions" of Chinese culture wouldn't really come to much as a coherent philosophy, but you'd be wrong. Taoism comes down to us not just from authors who translated Chinese into English, but also from a whole line of Neo-Confucian scholars who read the original texts, interpreted them, excised the crap ideas from them, and whipped the remaining ideas into a beautiful system where man, nature, and the heavens all work in microcosm and macrocosm. This system encompasses health, exercise, and mediation. It is practical b/c it observes without judging and draws fact-based conclusions about cause and effect. It is profound and philosophical in that there are concepts that capture ideas about Ultimate Reality, immortality, and the cyclical development of things and circumstances from generation to dissolution. The student of this philosophy gains context for himself, and an undying curiosity to learn more and to see what in life will come next for him.

The flexible and universal nature of Confucianism and Taoist concepts means that they offer a great deal to a secular person (like myself), but they are not at all hostile to the practice of religious faith and, in fact, will likely augment and enhance your appreciation of whatever religion you practice.

3) Strategy and a Long-Range View-- Earlier in this very column, this writer mentioned American values. We are proud of them, and we talk about them all of the time. And hey, it's all well and good to have values and to appreciate them, but if you truly do, you have to take action to protect them. This is not Hollywood. "The good guy" doesn't win by default.

Just because we are successful, and have been for a while, doesn't mean we will always be so. Even though we all have the will to win, very few of us have taken any time to study the basics of strategy. Mostly we examine that we are at Point A and we want to be at Point B, and we vaguely resolve to work hard to get there.

Winning and sustainment takes a lot of blood, sweat, and toil. You are much more likely to win if you are working hard, but you are almost certain to win if you are working both hard and smart, if you make and take the time to set up the playing field as you want it to be, and if you know everything there is to know about the other guy.

In Chinese history and philosophy, there is a great emphasis on observing conditions and adapting to them to accomplish an objective. Sunzi and many other great strategists (many of them Daoists) saw the value in preventing the waste of human life and other very valuable resources. All tools in the arsenal were made available, to include concealment and deception. We, with our idealistic nature, frown upon this, but we must admit that if an objective is truly worth achieving, nothing can be off the table. If we still choose to impose moral limits on our behavior, we have at least gained much from considering all options, and how they may best be deployed. Records of conflicts, strategic texts, and even games should be studied, regardless of whether we are ourselves violent people, and especially if we don't want violence. Look at the mess China was in at the time of Mao's death (1976) and compare it to where it is now. You think that just happened? No, my friend, that was the result of a plan, of many plans, and of a sustained effort toward it. You may not agree with how they do things 100 percent down the line, but aren't you at least curious as to how they got here from there? I am. You should be.

Anyhow, I hope this has given you food for thought, as it always does for me. Over time, I'll be handling these topics. I'll write about what I've learned, what I think, what I don't know but would like to know. This is fun for me. I hope it's fun for you.

Aside from my own enjoyment, though, I'm writing about these things because, let's be honest, ideas don't really belong to anybody. A good idea in one place is likely a good idea in another, and these are all concepts that inspire me and that I think we can all gain from. We are in a unique position, in that we can take their great ideas and, in the relatively free, prosperous environment that is The United States, adapt them, experiment with them, and improve upon them. Studying these concepts will make you better at whatever you do--better at work, better with your family, more whole as a person. We have the added benefit of no reverence; these ideas, useful though they are, don't come from our traditions, so whatever we can't use can go in the trash can. We can make revisions. We can add to them and make them better.

The future is not inevitable. It's time to roll up our sleeves and create the 22nd century. So instead of sitting around crying about how things aren't what they used to be, and how history's going to pass us all by, let's you and me steal their shit.

"Come Wander with Me"

People--and that would include me as well--generally trash remakes of pop culture artifacts as gratuitous retreads and white flags waved in the War on Cliche. The older I get, though, the more I have to admit that many was the piece of derivative hackwork that inspired me to seek the font of its inspiration. So the 1983 Landis/Spielberg/Dante/Miller collaboration on Twilight Zone: The Movie had me thirsting for the real deal. Luckily, my PBS affiliate aired The Twilight Zone on Saturday nights, and I generally caught it on the weekends when I stayed with my dad (who was cool enough to present me with a copy of Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion which for my ninth, tenth, and eleventh years of life was like unto a religious tome to me). Can't recall if they aired one or two episodes per night, but it always left me wanting more.

There was a class and elegance, an earnest to it, and a freshness of mind that inspired me as a kid. Still does to this day. There's just something wondrous and ineffably decent that defies description. I'll do my ode to it at some point in a future blog. This is something different.

One of the things reading Zicree's text helped me to come to terms with is what could be gained by paying attention to context. The episodes in this anthology show were not just stories, but they had recurring themes, special circumstances behind each production, and each season had its own struggles and challenges. (I have since become a "context junkie" with respect to most of the things I enjoy, but this was the very beginning of it all.)

Zicree asserts that this show peaked and jumped the shark after Season Three. I am inclined to disagree. Season Four is pretty thin, since they expanded the episodes to an hour in length, but there are some sure gems, some of my favorite episodes, in the fifth and final season.

One of the "lesser" episodes has haunted me since the first time I saw it. "Come Wander with Me," directed by Richard Donner (of Superman: The Movie and Lethal Weapon fame), originally aired on 22 May 1964. In it, Floyd Burney, who touts himself as "The Rock-A-Billy Kid" goes to a small village where he intends to pillage the locals for their folk songs. We get that this is what he does; he travels to out-of-the-way places, insinuates himself with the locals, buys their songs, and appropriates them as his own, then makes platinum records of them.

Upon arriving in the very small town, he is directed to an old music shop, full of archaic instruments hanging here and there, going to seed. The shop seems empty, so he perversely plays around with the instruments, but as he is doing so a spooky straight-out-of-"American-Gothic" shopkeeper appears out of nowhere. With a little expository dialogue, Burney tries to buy songs off of him. The shopkeeper tersely explains he has nothing Floyd nor any of his peers would be interested in. All of a sudden, Floyd is called away by the strumming of strings and a woman's voice humming a haunting melody.

Floyd does wander...through a wooded area, looking for the source of this enchanting song. Along the way he encounters birds that may or may not be vultures. On his walk, he fails to notice that he passes by a somber female figure, cloaked in black. He also doesn't notice a tombstone that is located in those woods--probably for the best, as it reads, "Floyd Burney, The Wandering Man."

In a few moments, the woman in the black cloak is replaced by Mary Rachel, a beautiful and rather demure young woman, a local. He discovers it is she who has been singing the song. Burney offers to buy it off of her. She is reticent to even sing it for him, since it's "secret; it belongs to somebody," and the Rayford brothers made her promise not to sing it any more. Floyd presses her further and she relents and sings it for him:

"Come wander with me love/Come wander with me/Away from this sad world/Come wander with me".

It seems to be a song of seduction. Burney again presses her to sell the song, but Mary Rachel tells him "It can't be bought; not that way." To convince her he will do the song justice, he sings it back to her and thereafter it as though some enchantment has fallen over her. They make out as the Woman in Black watches.

When the show returns from commercial, Mary Rachel is singing the full song and Floyd is recording it. She is preoccupied with his promises to take her away with him, and he clearly has dollar signs in his eyes, telling her what she wants to hear to get what he wants.

It really gets weird when her fiancee, Billy Rayford, shows up with a rifle in tow. Floyd asks her how Billy knew where to find him and she says, "He always comes here" and beseeches him not to confront Billy, "not this time!" When Rayford threatens him ("I'm gonna take you to my brothers; they know what to do with your kind"), Burney attacks and kills him. Mary Rachel now sings,

"You killed Billy Rayford/Bespoken to me/You killed Billy Rayford/'neath the old willow tree."

Burney panics and wants to make a break for it. Mary Rachel continues to use language that suggests that this all has happened before, exactly this way, and that maybe if they only do something differently, it may end differently this time. Floyd isn't hearing it and flees the wrath of the other Rayford brothers, back to the music shop. The shopkeeper seems to know exactly what is going on and refuses to hide him, so Burney flies into a rage and attacks and kills him, then attempts to hide amongst the old instruments. But these old instruments betray him...they inexplicably let out a cacophony that alerts the Rayford brothers to his presence, and they gun him down.

My ten year old self had no idea what to make of this, but I've thought about it quite a bit since then. The young pop star Floyd Burney (played by Bing Crosby's son) comes off as a crass, self-absorbed monster of a man. Like many the entertainer before him, he seeks to go and mine the rich veins of local folk (and though it's veiled, it's strongly suggested, ethnic) traditions for profit. He is a supposed artist that speaks more of commercial rivalries and intellectual property conventions than aesthetics and creative processes. He fixates on his commercial persona and trades on his stage name. He rarely if ever listens to what anyone else has to say, and he treats the locals, in the form of Mary Rachel and the shopkeeper, as objects to be exploited. Floyd Burney is a creature of appetite and what he craves is the inspiration and authenticity that he lacks. He is "The Wandering Man" because he stands for nothing and is No One. He is only what he can steal.

Starved as he is for inspiration, he is called by the siren song of Mary Rachel. He sees it as a prize to be hauled away from Yokel-ville but what it really is is a trap. When he sings the song to Mary Rachel, he takes on the voice of the cosmopolitan seducer--apt, since that is his intent, and doubtless how he proves his virility. Yet, the "hillbilly" environment he seeks to pillage has a life of its own, and we see that it just may have a quite poetic defense against carpetbaggers like Floyd.

Mary Rachel is the story's agent of naturalism. She appears in two guises: the nymphet, and as a sort of "libation bearer". In both guises, she has a meta-consciousness that they are acting out the preset narrative of the song; they have done so before, and they will do so again. In her younger aspect she is the catalyst of the tragedy; her innocence and beauty beckon Floyd hither. She is the object for him to manipulate. He is Adam and the Serpent, but she is Eve and the fruit.

In her older aspect, she bears sorrowful witness to the events in the song and stands watch as it happens, able to do nothing to alter it.

What may be lost during the first few viewings is there are also two Floyds: the one that is young, dumb, and full of you know what, and the other...in the grave.

What brought Floyd down? Like most young men, Burney succumbed to the allure of self-mythologizing. You musta heard of him...Floyd Burney...The Rock-A-Billy Kid? In youth, as in other uncertain stages of life we don't know who we are and don't know if we have "What It Takes," so we invent characters we like and who do have it, and we play them. I've done it. You've done it. Mostly we are able to walk away from it and its occasional excesses having learned something valuable about ourselves, and life.

But you can only get away with it so many times, and outside of his element, this time faking it wasn't good enough. Unlike city folk, nature can distinguish reality from artifice, and the local yokels here weren't so toothless. They saw right through him and weren't going to take his crap. You can be as slick, charismatic, and "rockabilly" as you like, but if you make your bones off of stealing what belongs to the other guy (women, songs) eventually it gets to where you have to pay up. So this time Floyd didn't get what he wanted, didn't get to rip off an identity from someone else, and now he lies in a marked grave that mocks him for not being much of anything at all. And a sad Woman in Black lurks, conflicted, tortured by knowing how the story ends, yet daring this arrogant, silly young man eternally to try it again and again. Come wander with you? Huh. Come Wander With Me.

We see it quite often in the ramshackle distorted egos of artists and celebrities, thrust into the spotlight too soon, or with not enough to say. What do you do when you're not up to the circumstances at hand? Pretend like you're somebody who is. They do this dance so hopefully we don't have to. With any luck, they discard the persona, this false skin, and become more themselves, a more balanced person, built to last and thrive, and less of an improvised caricature. The least fortunate find persona to be a prison they're trapped in, until death. Think of the ones that immediately spring to mind. Robert Johnson. Charlie Parker. Marilyn Monroe. Morrison. Hendrix. Joplin. Elvis. Cobain. Tupac. Real people with real lives who tried to keep it together and couldn't get out of the armor they built, or alive, anyway. Like Floyd, they got their immortality, but at such a price...

The lifelong grind-it-out struggle for authenticity brings to mind the last lines of the legendary commercial for that old "Hey Love" mail order album. Sometimes we see something beguiling and say, "Wow man, that style is awesome; let me borrow it." And generally we can do for a while; but eventually life says to us, "No my brother, you got to get your own."

"Now My Heart is Full."

07 February 2012

To Morrissey Claire Memolo on the day of her birth.

Hello, kid; it's your Papa.

I wanted to take a few minutes to welcome you into the world. Many kids come into the world by accident, or into unfortunate circumstances. You come in with two parents who loved each other so much that they wanted a child together, to see their great love demonstrated in the creation of another human being. And you were no accident. Would that things were financially better, but that aside, we only had you after much deliberation, planning, and sacrifice. Don't hear that as me saying you are a burden or some kind of hardship. We know how lucky we are to have you. Both of us have looked forward to your birth for a couple of decades. It's the start of your life, but it's also the beginning of the realization of so many of our dreams.

You might be wondering about that name of yours. Well, you got it because you deserve a name as wonderful and unique as you are. If there are other girls in your class named Morrissey, I can tell you we got seriously ripped off. It was always a pet peeve of mine to see so many children with such unimaginative names, or even imaginative ones that had little to no significance. Yours is taken from a hero of mine. Actually, I began to really appreciate him about the same time I was falling deeply in love with your mother. Like him, I hope you will be reflective, witty, and appreciative of beauty. He was a man who sided with the underdog, with those most others had cast aside and written off as losers. May you at least sometimes side with the losers, and always be willing to give them a second look and wonder how they might see the world. I hope that like him, you will not be afraid to be different, and to speak your mind and stand firm for the things that are important to you. (And it certainly wouldn't kill you if, like him, you were well read and well spoken, but I'll love you even if you're not.)

It may seem of questionable wisdom to name a child after someone so drenched in melancholy. To be quite honest, many members of your family have battled a tendency toward melancholy and other emotional problems. You will be able to avoid all of that, to, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, look to the stars even when you may be mired in the gutter. Your Papa is rather powerfully inspired by the theories of Darwin (Evolution) and Wilber (Integral); both point out the way to evolve is to encompass everything that has come before you, and surpass it. In the spirit of this, rather than being a celebration of sadness, an aspersion oft cast at your namesake, I know that you, over the course of your life, will be a perpetual triumph over it.

Above all else, what I most wish for you is the ability to have great trust and faith in yourself and those you choose to love and surround yourself with. I love you. In many respects, the way I was brought up ensured I would possess certain values that I want to pass on to you. Several other elements of my childhood environment--despite my parents' best efforts--left me from the time I was very very young with the feeling that the bomb could blow up, the train could come off the rails, at any given time, and the source of it could come from anywhere.

I'll tell you right now that I'll fight for the security, stability, and sanctity of our family to the death, if need be, and it will be a rock you can count on day in, day out, and I'll do nothing to cheapen or destabilize it. There is absolutely nothing I take more seriously or hold more sacred. I want to provide you with an environment where you feel secure, one where you can put your best foot forward into the future knowing how worthwhile and important you are, and one where we can build memories to cherish throughout the rest of our lives that will help get us through the bad times. It's important because your family is the template you'll base so many of your relationships on in the future, and you deserve the best effort we can muster.

I'm also going to have to be hard on you, and it won't be fun for me when I do, but I'm doing it all for the good. I've come to understand that your own strength of character is a function of your powers of will and reason; it's the only thing you can control in this world, and as such, the basis for all of the things that really matter. When I come down hard on you for not doing the right thing and make you do things the hard way, understand that it is not because I don't love you, but rather because I do, and I'm preparing you for a time when I'm not around.

I want you to be a person of great substance and moral strength. This will at times require you to distance yourself from what is popular, and that's as it should be. I have done things I knew were not right just to stand with the crowd, and I can tell you every time I ever did so, I deeply regretted it. Just as I have, you need to learn to trust your own judgement over the squawking and ephemeral opinions of others.

As much as I materially will want make things easy on you, especially if I have the means, you need to strive to stand on your own, and I'm crippling you if I don't encourage that. There will be times when this will not make you happy, but stop and try to understand the place it's coming from.

Every day, think of this: 10,000 generations before you lived, suffered, died, so you can live the life you're living now. Think of your entire line of ancestors. Likely, some were slaves, others fought in bloody wars, some endured rape and slaughter and persevered just so you can be here now. Are you honoring them by being the best you can be?

So even though it seems like many years from now, I'm looking ahead in time to the day you'll leave our house and strike out on your own. It will be bittersweet and I will want to recall and relive the years between here and there. Likely, I'll tearfully think, "Oh, it went by too fast," and sigh and a part of me will wish you were still the baby I hold in my arms. It brings me to tears even now, but I do need to think about that fateful day in the far-flung future. I need to think of it often, and be certain I'm doing all I can to ensure when the time comes you are ready to stand on your own, that you don't stagger and look backward at me in helpless reticence, but instead dash forward with sure footing and eyes that lust to experience whatever adventure is yet to come. I want you to love strength, to love knowledge more, but to love compassion most of all.

But if you forget all of this just please do remember to truly love and honor yourself. You are the Arrow of Hope that I am shooting into the gaping abyss of the future, and wherever you go, you will always carry me with you.

Yes, there will all-too-soon come a time when you will be a woman and lead your own life, and that is as it should be. Your mother and I will try to have you in a good spot by then.

But just earlier today you were born, and now you're sleeping, swaddled, in my arms, and let me just close my eyes and imagine the days to come.

Walking hand in hand with my little baby girl.

But let's not walk so quickly. We'll get there.

We'll get there.

Love,

-Papa-

The Secret Ingredient, Part One

To start this whole deal off, I struggled with several approaches, several topics I'd like to address. I suspect I will address them all, over time. Recent events have made me think about what this generation of fathers might look like, if they step up and give it their all. And also, the type of people conscientiously fathered children might grow to become.

As Americans, we have benefited a great deal from what those who have come before us have provided. We still, though the fumes are now burning out fast, are beneficiaries of the fact that during WW I and WW II, that paragon of civilization we call Europe blew itself nearly back to the Stone Age fighting for...whatever... and America emerged victorious, left to rebuild the world and reap the economic benefits of doing so, and the fact that there was no one credible left to compete with us. Well, the Cold War and its aftermath has flattened the playing field. Asia is rising. Russia is, to some extent, enjoying the benefits of not being communist, though authoritarianism still reigns, to a degree. In the past few years it seems that the economy and all of our traditional values have gone to hell in a handbasket. But still, debt-ridden as we are, rudderless as we may seem, we have more resources to put to the work of raising decent and self-reliant children than we ever have before, so long as we muster the will and energy to do so. It is worth noting that the more important of these resources have little to do with money and lots to do with will and creativity.

One of the things I had to learn about in my years of studying philosophy and political theory, and teaching American literature has been our national tendency toward realism. When balanced with our equal tendency toward idealism, it serves us well; look at our traditions of crime fiction (which I will write more about in the future) and journalism...they teach us valuable lessons, to dream, but also to temper our vision of the way things ought to be with the way they actually are and the limits of what can be, and that has pushed us forward. The most honest amongst us knows to embrace one without the other (in the guises of passive fatalism and wishful thinking) is delusional and pathological--a faux and brittle muscularity or a paralyzing timidness.

The cultural inheritance of the post-war and "Babyboomer" generations have been mixed. The boon of winning WWII made us materially prosperous to an extent previously unheard of. Amongst such boom times the whole of our society rightfully wanted their piece of the American dream they sweated and bled to create, so we had the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and feminism. Some of the more opportunistic have exploited the resentment toward the basic fact that the world is no longer the oyster of the white Anglo-Saxon male, but I'll stand alone if need be to assert that a balancing was certainly in order, and that ultimately we should be proud, grateful, and not bitter that such corrections took place during our era. That more opportunity exists for all is a cause for celebration. We make ourselves ugly and decrepit when we grasp that which is not ours. To paraphrase the first scene of "The Wire", Season One, "this is America; everybody gets a shot."

One of the more dynamic developments of the post-war generation was to begin to see the value of cultures we formerly dismissed as inferior. A favorite movement of mine, especially in my youth, was the Beat Generation, as demonstrated in the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Could there be some value in the ways Brown America lived, and might there be something to emulate there? In this, there was a challenging of middle class values, and a fairly straight line can be drawn from this countercultural movement to hippies to punks to the mainstream youth culture of Generation X, its embracing of hiphop and mashups of pop culture genres and artifacts. The hedonism, I've grown to have less and less respect for as I age, but even the most staunchly conservative aspects of my psyche have to concede that there's value in knowing that a suburban house with a white picket fence and a Cadillac are not the "end all/be all" things to aspire to. There's more to life, and even if I like these things (which, hey, if I am being real, I have to admit that I do!), it matters how I go about getting them. Just as important, it matters to me and should matter to you also how I treat people who are not like me, and as the motto of my home state of North Carolina instructs, I should pay greater attention to how I am moreso than how I seem.

The hippie counterculture of the sixties, as ridiculous as it seems to me on its face, offers some lessons. Yes, it is easy for a teenager to criticize things they take for granted and don't know the cost of. It is also self-indulgent to "drop out" of society and earn some mythologically-inflated sense of self-awareness and leave others holding the bag. But to consider the proper value of material things and social customs is still worth doing. If a way of life leaves you empty and spent, might there be some other way to go about things? I must say, I really have come to appreciate the eastern texts that the Beats and the hippies brought to our attention...not as a means to ditch my own heritage, but as a lens through which to view and evaluate contemporary life.

We err just as much as "the squares" if we uncritically abandon the values our families bestowed on us in favor of some newish and shiny exotic way to be. But for me, I have always struggled for that middle ground--appreciating tradition while also keeping my ears open for something new...my powers of reason are my guide, and if I can't trust them, really, I can't trust anything anyhow.

So here we are. Who doesn't have economic woes of some sort, due to our urge toward consumerism, but yet we are bogus to pretend we don't like the material comforts our modern age has to offer. I really dig that my wife is beautiful, educated, capable, and completely my equal, and I can't say it diminishes me one bit. I embrace Shakespeare, Rod Serling, Duke Ellington, Morrissey, Superman, Captain America, the Daodejing, Mark Twain, and The Federalist Papers equally, b/c they all make up who I am and "How It Is." They all point to what has been and what I want to be.

As much as we bitch, we really do live in the best of times. Pounded as we are day by day about how we as a nation are declining, the one thing I can tell you with certainty is that never have we as men had so many resources with which to produce great children.

One reason that our mother and fathers' generation may have experienced a substantially higher rate of divorce is the move toward independence and autonomy of women in their day, and the perception of such as a downgrading in the status of all things male. We know now this was a confused and fearful overreaction to the unknown. Imagine how men were over the ages stifled in their own way within the narrow confines of traditional masculinity. Not able to cry or be playful. Not able to share his innermost self with his loved ones for fear of being found lacking in some way. Only with deep shame being able to defer to his wife something she may be better at doing, or letting her bring home the proverbial bacon.Having to spend an inordinate amount of time competing with other males for status and position, for things you couldn't care less about and to the detriment of priorities that reflect who you really are and what you really love. True, these all pale in comparison with how women have suffered, but if we are honest the practice of patriarchy and traditional "maleness" have cost us, and dearly.

But because of what has happened in America these past hundred years or so, we get to say about the sort of men we want to be, and this is a great thing. We can stick to the old script if that's what we want, but it's a choice now. We might want to tear up the script and do something else, and we can do that, too. Consider that even taking the time to think thoughts such as these would have been considered unmanly in the recent past, though now I am reveling in them and the people most dear in my life are benefiting from them.

These days, as fathers, we can be in several parts traditional alpha male, nurturer, coach, friend, protector, and provider, whatever our role calls for, to an extent we have never experienced. Unless you have very rigid ideas as to what a father should be, this is a golden age in which to be one. And sure, we're no longer in an age where a white male gets handed an extravagant job just for having done some time in college. Now we have to compete, and that will make us raise our own game, so it's all for the good. Even at a time when the economic pie seems smaller and more sliced up than ever, it's really just an opportunity, not a crisis, to get our priorities in check. (It's all relative--heck, many in much less prosperous parts of the world would crack ten men over the skull with a rock and swim through a pool of razorblades just to have the opportunities we take for granted on a daily basis.) We still have enough resources, if channeled to the right places, to raise the next "Greatest Generation".

And it seems I've painted myself into a corner, eh? Just getting to the heart of my topic with no space to develop it? But in thinking so, you would be WRONG. You see, along with the typical music/comic/movie/politics/philosophy blog that this has been in the past, a theme that I'll also be writing on and to is this: how can we as men take the limited resources left to us and raise strong, resilient, thoughtful, compassionate children? I can't say I know exactly, b/c I'm just now joining this club, so it will be a bit of an improvisation (but hey, don't all exciting stories get carried by the improvisational actions of the characters featured in them?). I will say this: I'm ready to do it, and it will get done.

Rightfully so, this is my greatest context on everything now; the things that were once rather abstract are reframed through the lens of a papa, so it just makes sense that this sort of subject matter will get thrown in with the stuff I've previously dealt with. I get that this topic, if handled poorly, can be lame and preachy, but it's an important one. I'll do my best to steer clear of that and give you some truth and some insight worth reading and not make this such a "me me me" show.

I welcome and appreciate your comments and thoughts about these matters and any others; unless addressed specifically, I'll let you have your say. The blog itself is likely enough "say" for me.

From here on out: weekly, on Sunday evenings.

Thanks for your patience and your indulgence.