DOES OUR CONCEPT OF MANILINESS MATTER?

[Hiromi]

FireKat,

 

Im glad to see youre getting to put to use the Forensic Psychology class you took at the community college last Fall. But you might need to brush up on your profiling skills. Im twice as old, but probably as immature as you might suppose. I am open to good advice, even from you (as long as it doesnt involve urine and a rope, a short pier, or hiking).

 

But I will agree to lay off the personal attacks, if you want to call them that. I find that a good many of the forum members arent too shy about giving their unsolicited opinions about me or others.

 

I was raised in an Italian American family in the suburbs of Chicago. My father, a great depression era kid, had mostly hoodlum friends. The idea of boy scouting was always considered to be laughable in my house growing up. Boy scouts were just above the contempt felt for Bobby Kennedy and his G-men who would harass my fathers friends, most notably Sam Giancana.

 

So it was quite a long evolution for me to discover that Boy Scouting and my Christian heritage were something to distill away from the more regrettable ethos of my Italian-American heritage.

 

But there is, I think, a shread of truth to the goody-two-shoes epitaph thrown at boy scouting from my fathers generation.

 

I can see it in some of the posters on this site. I dont think that my father and his hooligan friends would ever have gotten involved with a boy scouting unit- even if Bob White was running it. They were too involved in raiding the Indian burial sites along the Des Plaines River and hunting rabbits in the Jewish cemetery and playing practical jokes.

 

The closest my dad got to boy scouts was beating them up and throwing snow balls into their meetings in the basement of the school in Forest Park.

 

My eyes were open to scouting after 9-11 and my reassessment of a lot of things in my life.

 

The moral imperative of correctly raising boys struck me as obvious as the war began. As I took the reins of my sons scouting unit (with giant reservations- it was supposed to go to another man who got transferred to Pennsylvania) I looked into Baden Powell and the various web sites like Inquiry.net. I was amazed at what I found and inspired to take this calling that fell into my lap.

 

So I am middle aged a former college liberal radical who marched on Washington against the first Iraq war.

 

When I was in my early twenties I was an uber-liberal calling Boy Scouting fascist and traveling to the Soviet Union looking for answers.

 

When I was in my mid twenties I was living in a yurt on an artist colony in Maine growing my own food and slaughtering my own goats for food. (This confused my liberal friends at the time).

 

When I was in my thirties I was running a Bar in Chicago and running with poets and artists (and artists models).

 

When I was in my late thirties I re-read Ayn Rand, the Bible, Aristotle, Buckminster Fuller, and I discovered adulthood and became a school teacher and portrait painter, got married and had kids.

 

So here we are Fire Kat.

 

Again- Im sure that you and Lisa Bob and le Voyageur and Trevorum and Gold Winger are all very nice people. And I am sure that you all have really excellent reasons and passions for why you care about the scouting program that children receive.

 

I brought up the conversation about Manliness because I feel it is something important. The same with the BSA issues. I realize my style can be in-your-face and confrontational, but I have pretty much kept my sincerity in the posts. While I delight in agitating liberals and liberal environmentalists especially, I was not trolling for its own sake. I really do think we need to empower boys to be civilization builders and I can think of no greater earthly project than that.

 

Pappy

 

[Lisabob]

I am really beginning to wonder about you folks. I have only pity for those who claim to be leaders and role models for young men but who have not yet learned to understand courtesy. And I find it telling that you only seem to personally attack women Pappy.

 

But if you want to know, I teach political science for a living. I am well aware that this does not make what I say received truth and there are plenty of other ways to develop knowledge. My favorite interpretation of phd is "piled higher and deeper." But FWIW, that is what I meant.

 

 

(This message has been edited by lisabob)

[evmori]

In answer to the original question, who cares!

[le Voyageur]

Pappy,

 

 

One of my jobs in the military was to keep young Officers from hearing only their own brilliancy......

 

 

[Hiromi]

LE Voyageur,

 

Was that supposed to be a cryptic nuanced back-handed compliment? I'm not sure. Congradulations on your assignment in the military.

 

But be at ease, I truly did my darndest to find the brilliance in your comments over the past week.

 

I believe you alreadyreceived my reports.

 

 

Pappy

 

[le Voyageur]

 

 

I've always played the role of the devils advocate. It time, a lot of the concepts that I tossed your way will start to make sense....

[Hiromi]

Hello Scouters,

 

There have been many interesting replies to this thread. Some I have found have served my understanding of how to refine my own concept of what manhood is. Some of the comments revealed the sensitive nature of this idea or at least the terminology of manliness and manhood. I suppose I helped more than most to muck up the waters with my language of girly-man-ness and such. In as much as it detracted from a good argumentative thread, I am sorry.

 

To go back to answer Old Grey Eagles original question, when he asked me for clarification on what the manly arts are, I will give a very brief shot at it.

 

The sexism of terms can date back easily to Roman times when Feminine Nouns like Poeta, Agricola, and Nauta, where none-the-less to be used in a sentence as a male-verb, and have male adjective agreement. This exception to the highly structured Latin language was due to the fact that covention dictated that Poetry, Farming, and Sailing were seen as predominantly occupations held by men (Even though there were woman highly involved and proven in these fields).

 

I wasnt trying to bring up a sexist issue. I have a very soft spot in my heart for tomboys. And I have many boys in my unit who definitely tend to be interested in what might wrongly be considered to be less masculine directions. I personally love to cook and sew and read poetry and listen to Italian Bel Canto Opera (And I sob profusely when I listen to opera). I dont think for one second that this makes me less manly (though you guys are welcome to kid if you are so inclined).

 

I think boys and girls both need to be free from convention and the approbation of their meaner peers to grow towards their natural inclinations and to pursue the interests that takes their fancy. This can then possibly mature into a stronger calling and possible career or an interesting multi-faceted life.

 

What I meant, I suppose, by manly arts, was a substantial repertoire of skills required to replicate those elements of handicraft, technologies, modes of behavior and outlook, which can replicate civilization (and thus enable children to better appreciate the civilization that they are born into).

 

For an example that may not have been missed by Baden Powell, I would look to a British Ship of The Line. A Ship of the Line, if I am correct in remembering, was a ship that was given orders to pursue the will of the Royal Navy, often into areas that were too distant for a quick communication with a higher authority. Thus the Captain and his command were given a fair amount of discretion in decision making not only about the operations of the ship or the fleet, but also in matters of diplomacy, warfare, the mission, etcetera.

 

A ship of the line was a floating example of British civilization and a representative of His or Her Majesty in some limited respects (very limited). But what a ship of the line could do was none-the-less amazing by any historical standards.

 

The crew was made up of men steeped in craft and technical know-how that made them not only able to sail over the most treacherous waters of the ocean, but to rebuild their ship, build new ships and construct colonies and outposts if needs be, navigate, chart new waters, conduct scientific expeditions, communicate with indigenous populations, use and repair weapons, communicate in a number of coded languages, speak an expansive technical vernacular that understood economic,military, diplomatic realties, and in short, serve as representatives of the British Empire.

 

When I think of boys, I wonder to myselfThey like that computer game- sure and they are pretty good using it too but how much do they really understand about what went into that device, both historically, materially, and technically?. How much can our boys replicate technical know how how far back does their knowledge begin?

 

Do our boys understand the mechanical advantage of pulleys? Can they build a wheel from wood to make a task easier? Can they make their own rope? Can they channel water to serve a use (irrigation- power- navigation- etcetera). Can they dig a trench? Can they turn mud into brick? Do they know the formulation of bronze, or the technique that hardened iron into steel? In short, can they build things from raw materials if they had too?

 

So I suppose I see the abilities to replicate what we consider civilization at its basic levels; shelter- motive power- basic fabrication of raw materials into tools and useful items that I would say are basic manly arts (but open to women as well).

 

This is not to pay short shrift to those arts of painting, architecture, design, music, dance, baking, pottery, etcetera. But there is a hierarchy of needs in a society I am sure we would all agree with.

 

I see boys and girls being trained to be paper pushing clerks in their schools with very short shrift given the arts I described above. I think this is problematic on many levels. I see generations being ignorant to the technology that they so insist is their birthright. I see an arrogance being born of this ignorance that can threaten our American experiment. Our tools are increasingly being designed and built by countries that understand hunger and hard work perhaps better than we. Indians (from India) seem very focused (to a fault perhaps) on insuring that they produce legions of highly trained technocrats and industrialists. And the results are surfacing in the business world.

 

So maybe Nessmuk is right- Are we sure that BP would have been happy with the focus of scouting? BP and Beard and Seton and men of their generation used the terms manliness without giggling and blushing they meant something very serious by it. And maybe some of you forum members might quickly point out that these men were troglodytes and sexist imperialist pigs. Fair enough- maybe they were not as enlightened as we might be in many regards. Never the less, I think we owe it to ourselves to look through the imperfections of our ancestors for what they had to offer us.

 

I personally think that these men understood first hand the enormity of the efforts of the age that they lived in and how easily we could all fall down without the right leadership and social energy focused n the proper rearing of children.

 

I no longer desire to debate you all on this subject because of obligations I have over here on my end. But I appreciate all the feedback you offered in this discussion and I hope it served in some way to inform future discussions on this forum and the way we discuss ideas of what boys and girls need to know and understand and how it is related to our larger programme of scouting and civilization.

 

 

Semper Paratus

 

Pappy

(This message has been edited by Pappy)

[Knight]

Thanks for the references, Nessmuk. I will go to our local library to get those books.

[packsaddle]

LisaBob, I have to admit being clueless about these things...how was I supposed to know (unless I read EVERY post) before a few messages back, that FireKat was a woman? I figured your name correctly but I had CalicoPenn figured for a woman for a long time before I figured that one out (sorry Calico) and there have been others. Think about names like Claire and Evelyn. I have regularly made tragic (and personally embarrassing) errors of protocol thinking these guys were women. Worse, most of the time, I don't think about gender as it relates to the ideas. Is that clueless too?

 

Anyway, FireKat, I also have to admit that after reading your self-description,....I'm fairly intrigued.

Hope that's not taken as an insult.

[Hiromi]

The death of manliness

 

Hans Zeiger

 

October 6, 2006

 

 

 

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/zeiger/061006

 

 

 

[scoutmomma]

Quoting Hans Zeiger on manliness? With a column in which he baselessly claims a link between homosexuality and pedophilia? Oh, puh-lease.

[Gold Winger]

"But if you want to know, I teach political science for a living."

 

Wow! What a way to bilk people out of their money!

 

" Im sure that you and Lisa Bob and le Voyageur and Trevorum and Gold Winger are all very nice people."

 

You'd be wrong. A friend who was finishing up her PhD in psychology once described me as a sociopath. I liked that. I still like it. It gives the guys who like my daughter something to think about.(This message has been edited by Gold Winger)

[Hiromi]

FireKat said about Pappy:

 

He has..."A bit of buried anger toward strong, intelligent women maybe?"

 

My dearest FireKat, I give you a list of not only my favorite women but some of my favorite people. They are all women I listen to. They all love and champion strong men. They are all hot. They are all strong and intelligent, and they all could probably kick your rear: All qualities I admire and in a good woman.

 

My Wife

Colleen Carroll Campbell

Ann Coulter

Laura Ingraham

Peggy Noonan

 

Here is Peggy Noonan's take on the return of Men after 9-11

 

http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=71

 

 

[DanKroh]

"I give you a list of not only my favorite women but some of my favorite people. They are all women I listen to. They all love and champion strong men. They are all hot. They are all strong and intelligent, and they all could probably kick your rear: All qualities I admire and in a good woman.

[snip]

Ann Coulter

Laura Ingraham

Peggy Noonan"

 

Wow, that explains a lot....

[evmori]

Now it's starting to get a little scary! The next thing you know we will be discussing manly women!