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TT, I will not criticize a man for fighting and not winning when those around him refuse to even fight. That’s Ted Cruz.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361655/art-impossible-andrew-c-mccarthy
I spent a week in Texas once a couple years ago. Still makes me nostalgic for the America I grew up in. It’s the remnant of a better America. More cohesion. More amiability. More “live and let live.” More unified sense of purpose.
Minus Austin and San Antonio lunatic lefties, unfortunately. Texas needs to retake the Alamo.
I like Rick Perry. I’ve often thought he’s the strongest dark horse in the race, but more for his obvious love of and skill at retail politics. I hadn’t factored the manliness aspect. Thanks for the thoughtful write-up, TT.
If manliness is where it’s at, why is the god of just wars a goddess?
The best answer I can come up with is that manly men are so [CoC]in’ cocky that they believe they can make anything and everything their mistress, if they just venture to.
Balderdash! For one, I never said just. For another, polemics comes from the Greek word for war, polemos. For a, well, a third?, yet another other?, well, you know what I mean!, the goddess of war has always been a goddess so far as I know, & it’s somehow to do with civilization or wisdom, so take it up with Homer–I mean to write on Homer, but the presumption is as yet too rich for my blood… Her eyes gleam. She is battleborn.
Do you know the speech about men holding their manhoods cheap?–well, it seems that’s advertising now. The age of speeches about nobility has passed–& therefore the speeches that exhort men. Except when Reagan spoke on the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. Think of America going the way of England–the manliest politician after Churchill was the Great Lady-
That’s not my criticism: I wanted more from that fight, not less. I usually like Mr. McCarthy’s suggestions & I agree with him here. But Sen. Cruz seems to think he’s presidential material. Why is he unknown to America then! I do not see him breaking his back trying to remedy things–not now, not when the shutdown was a going concern. Do you know that Lincoln got his debates with Douglas, then the most important man in America, or almost, by harassment? He used to follow him around at Dem events & try to give a rebuttal, on the spot, afterward, if anyone would listen, in enemy territory! Sen. Cruz has advantages untold in this newer world. Let him do that, then I will take him more seriously.
Well, you mentioned “goddess”, which means Athena, the “god(dess) of just war”, right?
All speeches exhort, so I suppose you mean they’re exhorting something other than men now. But men are not men unless women of valor give them a little pushback.
Anyhow, along with manliness comes presumption – a presumption, you note, that is often wrong. Men may fear a virgin, but not enough to deter the more venturesome from trying to have her anyhow. The difference with Athena is that they can’t.
I’ve read my Homer, just is not her epithet… I’m raising the eyebrow at you, Midge!
No, all speeches are not exhortations. But certainly most that are exhortations are not about nobility. The classic teaching about passion is, some speeches are to the good–deliberative or legislative speeches, pros & cons of laws or other common doings–some are to the just–forensic or judiciary speeches–some are to the noble.
Yeah, sure, but the question is, how to deal with that. The modern option seems to be wiping manliness out of city & man.
Don’t know what this is about, but it doesn’t seem useful.
Well the distincti0n we learned in school is that Athena and Ares are both gods of war, but Athena, the goddess, is associated more with the wars that are justly and cleverly fought, while Ares is simply pugilistic and irritable. Hence the distinction (Ares, god of war; Athena, goddess of just war). Maybe a lazy distinction, but it seems a useful one.
Homer kept on calling dawn “rosy fingered”. Apparently not rosy-toed or rosy… er… nevermind. So while Homerian epithets aren’t meaningless, they’re not the only way to rightfully describe or classify the numinous. What I remember most from the Odyssey are Athena’s gray eyes.
You know I do this just to twit you.
It is useful & lazy both. I’m not against school learning–but Ricochet is after school! Also, justice need not be too clever nor cleverness too just, no?
If you happen to develop love for Homer, there is a book by Benardete that talks about the epithets at length. Have you heard about Homer nodding? Nowhere near as much as all his admirers put together, to say nothing of detractors.
Do you know that nature, the way philosophers talk about it was invented by Homer? Hero, the word, too, seems to be his work.
As for the rest–I fear you’ll get me every time–sometimes, I’m like a bull, I see something & well, I don’t see anything else…
Heh–this is the strange part of the day, when nothing practical is said. Get yourself a drink in the evening, you might like some of this. Midge & I have been quarreling for months & I hope devoutly to keep it up for years, should God & nature so conspire-
Translation: Perry isn’t Rubio.
‘Heh–this is the strange part of the day, when nothing practical is said. Get yourself a drink in the evening, you might like some of this. Midge & I have been quarreling for months & I hope devoutly to keep it up for years, should God & nature so conspire-‘
OK, TT, just don’t dispense with virtuous manliness?
I’m not manly. I just have seen men & admire them, rare as they are. I think other people might feel that way, too–I know my teenaged nephew does–or did–I’ll have to see what teenage life is like these days… When I was a boy, action movies were about manliness. That was the first thing I learned about America & I’ve never forgotten it. Nowadays, well my fair lady had no idea of the name John Wayne, much less the man or the work. But generations learned the basics of American manliness by watching his movies. The work that does may seem like precious little up until it’s gone…
So I alternate between various things I write. Poetry & philosophy are really unmanly–but it’s my education, & happily, in these days, they are needed to defend manliness from people who think they’ve turned life into a scientific project & then when you’er not looking they’re sucking up to tyrants. But they’re called dictators, if not agrarian reformers, so that makes it ok… Ideally, I’get a chance to help educate men, that would do some good with my rather limited abilities… & I’m a pol.sci lifer–I’ve seen the harm education does to the souls of men.
Don’t get me started–I may not be manly, but I know anger.
Men specifically? Education specifically?
Or bad education to both men and women?
Sounds like fodder for another post, IMO.
True, but life is too interesting for all of us to develop the same interests, and some interests are developed at the expense of others.
If you mean justice in the Sowellian sense of a process that is carried out, whether the results are cosmically just or not, I would say no, there’s no need to be excessively clever (thought even there, cleverness beyond what’s normal for man is quite useful).
If, however, you mean justice in a more cosmic sense – and it seems to me that you do – then all sorts of cleverness (and even low cunning) might go in to giving someone his just deserts. Mortal justice can content itself with simply having carried out the process, irrespective of results, but to call down divine justice is to ask for even more.
I would call divine justice’s appetite for cunning insatiable, but maybe that’s just me.
It’s specifically men–young men, I have in mind. Education does a lot to hurt them; good education these days is just not trying to hurt them. But education that speaks to young men as young men & teaches them about being men is next to impossible.
The combination of the authority of the professor & the appeal & majesty of stories about war & politics is not really replaceable. But one gets the sense that if young Americans were faced with Washington or Lincoln, they could care less-
I’d like to write about this, but I’m no professor nor yet American, so I think maybe there are people more qualified–I’d like it even better if I could read what they have to say.
When I was a boy in liberal arts, I met a kid from Wisconsin–you could spot the American on him from a mile away even if he was going the other way. I saw through that kid the first time we had a talk, I guess we were playing basketball one evening. It wasn’t magic, he just talked to me. Nobody at the college felt like they owed it to him to hear him out or help him out with what troubled him. I thought that was a disgrace-
How do I mean justice? Well, giving people what they deserve is justice. People cannot really live up to that, although everyone seems to want that. Do you think Americans are satisfied with the process? Are Americans strangers to anything from mob violence to outrage about SCOTUS decisions? If process really meant a lot to them, that should not be. It may mean enough for them not to rebel, but no more. I see my two nephews a few days a week on average–from their toddler days, they learned about fair & unfair, even as they attempt with varying successes to tyrannize over adults. It’s a long job of work to get them to accept process justice, but it will never be enough–it never can be.
The other part, what justice would look like–how far you can push equality & how to conceal inequality within it, I learned from Aristophanes & Plato. That’s a long talk, Midge, but maybe we’ll have time one day-
I think you’d appreciate their sense of humor, you’re devilish wise-
Because RP remembers America as it founders envisioned does not make him a “heroic” man it makes him an everyman, as in mankind since the Enlightenment. Every man is willing to stand up for these values.