Mental and physical ascendancy is the precondition of masculinity. The wielding of both to establish and preserve sovereignty and order is the duty of the masculine. Instilling the same in our future generations is imperative. “Come with me if you want to live” should not be merely the memetic memorial of a bygone breed.
I grew up peeking at Charles Bronson reruns through the gaps in the couch. “Ayatollah” was an all-too-common term and “Grenada” lingered in the air like the scent of a Marlboro drifting lazily from the haze-filled kitchen. Victory over tyranny was the theme during my entrance. Good versus evil was an ever-present maxim, the triumph of discovery and democracy over despots and demagoguery, I swear you could feel it between denim dreams.
My personal hero was my own Grandfather, himself a humble hero of a war against Japanese aggression. He had come home from a faraway land, laid down his rifle, and armed himself with an armful of kids that would grow up to be my uncles and mother. But he also replaced his instrument of war with the age-old instrument of wisdom, literature. I remember all of the stories my family and half the town told about him. He was a regular Audie goddamn Murphy. But he never spoke of those moments in my presence.
So what I recall most are the many stories of adventure he used to awaken my adolescent mind to the wonders of the world that lay beyond the borders of my youthful ignorance. I found myself in awe of his wondrous tales depicting the brutality of the Wild West, the perilous pilgrimage of T.E. Lawrence across Arabian sands, and toreadors staring down bulls in Barcelona. He was my early testament to the fact that not all men are created equal. For certainly, few could have rivaled him for equal footing in the hallowed halls of my heart or my esteem.
My grandmother was a sweet, saintly woman. She would watch “Jeopardy” religiously and, as a quiet observer, I became mesmerized by the endless contest of knowledge. But I was also a boy, and I could only pay attention to contests devoid of conflict for so long. So, whenever she left the room, I would turn the television to “American Gladiators,” a show displaying brawny, spandex-clad warriors engaged in what I perceived as combat of the existential kind. By age five, I was sure that was all I wanted to be.
With the television knobs, I struck a meticulous and complimentary balance between scholastic faculty and kinetic prowess. As the world emerged from the Cold War, I watched the wall crumble in Berlin and another war build up in its place in the Gulf. Bo Jackson was the embodiment of athleticism, Rambo was a god, Reagan was the last statesman, and Rhodesian remnants wept as farmers lay headless in their former fields. The ghastly admonition of all this whispered to a wide-eyed boy, “Be a man among men.”
From the very beginning, it made perfect sense to root for the home team. Still, my entertainment was not my ultimate reality. I turned off the television to find for myself what manhood was and to see to its becoming. My friends and I erected forts in the forest as temples to the majesty of force. Our teeth bared, we defied encroachment and dared rivals to intrude. That simple structure of felled trees was the work of our own hands, our glory, our civilization exemplar. I was an avid participant in fist-fights and footraces, spelling bees, and baseball games. All is life.
I read of Kipling and of courage, Admundsen and ambition, Alexander and inner anguish, Thermopylae and duty, and Tecumseh and the advancement of the tribe. Between Perseus and Siegfried, the magic of myth enthralled my senses. I lost myself in a whirlwind of history: Huns, Sepoys, Magyars, Hussars, Mameluks, and Cossacks all paraded across my room in ethereal array. Musashi, Wingate, Garibaldi, and Franco were my companions. From the Falklands to Dien Bien Phu, my passport was each turn of the page. Zulu impis, Medieval crusaders, Greek hoplites, and Roman legions, their violence and virtue shaped my world and captivated my literary interest.
I grew from student to recruit, to one of the Few and Proud. As a child, I had discovered the words of von Clausewitz between the encyclopedic pillars of my bookshelf. As a young man, I found their meaning between the rhythm of cyclic fire in the Middle East. I entered the arena and became that American Gladiator. Like my Grandfather, I came home from war with a keen insight concerning the intimate, inadvertent, and crucial effects of force. And just like him, I traded one precious instrument for another. I picked up a pen. As before, I recognized my calling to face the beasts, the brigands, and the betrayals.
The world has since changed, as it is surely designed. Fist-fights are forbidden, footraces are rewarded indiscriminately, and hardness is shunned for a more palatable, yet superficial appearance. In all of the “solutions” that surround me, I questioned whether I was the lie, if it was everything that I knew and everything that had made me that needed to be corrected. Combat, as the trial that it has always been, was the most authentic experience I had ever submitted myself to. I recall the realness of a bullet’s passing, the instantaneous, undeniable truth that it forced me to reconcile with.
There was no deception in these moments, or in the ones from my childhood that remain so vivid. It had deconstructed everything about the world around me and made me challenge the mechanisms that make it turn. I couldn’t afford to fall into the slumber of nihilism, despite what I had seen and lived. It awakened rather, a world within me, the one that had on the external, slipped away from society, and one that society desperately requires for its own recovery.
This reality aroused my consciousness to the structure necessary to ignite the darkness and regain the intended balance of enlightenment. In all of its progress, the world of ruins surrounding me fed my rejection of its kumbaya-like artifice. Where tolerance of evil, instead of unapologetic confrontation, subtly became the band-aid for social ills. Where insipid insincerity now takes precedence over prejudice with a thinly-veiled threat from behind its cracked veneer. I am convinced that it is the modern world that is the liar and that all we have been birthed from, all that we know, all that we have been forced to second guess, is the truest of truths.
Across my sensory landscape, I’ve blazed a trail into the wicked wilds. I’ve constructed a shanty in this forlorn glen, and in the fashion of Kjelgaard, my longing glows like the amaretto-scented cinder of an old pipe. The weather changes outside my two soul-stained windows, I forage about the exile within me like all enterprising men must as the truth crashes through the quiet.
Experience, I gather as one gathers wood for an imminent winter, feeding the evening fire of my resolve. Winter has come. This is the redoubt, and I beckon the outcasts shunned by modernity into my abode. Through its tumult and challenges, failures and successes, its inequities and bloodletting, our world was never wrong.
Capable men with instruments, even those reading this now, have always made it right. Right it we will, write it we will, until we wrest the errant world back to its sanity. Whether by blood, sweat, and tears or ink, hope, and years, there are deserts waiting to be watered. Take up the task.