Nonsense Men
October 17, 2012
ALAN writes:
If my father had ever been asked to name the worst thing about American culture that he had witnessed during the second half of his life, I am confident he would have said: The surrender of authority by American white men. To yield their authority, he would say, is as good as yielding their families, neighborhoods, schools, cities, laws, borders, the armed forces, and national sovereignty.
It was common years ago to hear the words “no-nonsense man” applied to someone who was obviously serious about doing his job and meeting his responsibilities. How often have you heard that expression in recent years? Seldom or never? That is because there are so few American men today who fit that description. The no-nonsense men have been superseded by the Nonsense Men. In 1966 The Beatles sang about the “Nowhere Man.” Today they could sing about the “Nonsense Man:” The soft, feminized, acquiescent, “flexible,” adolescent-witted boy-man, visible today in every public place and replete with manners, clothing, and vocabulary to match. Tribes of such boy-men are what Americans got when American white men agreed to surrender their authority.
Many consequences of that surrender of authority have been chronicled at The Thinking Housewife (and discussed generally in the Sept. 1 post “Without Authority or Responsibility, Men Surrender everything”).
Here are two concrete examples from St. Louis.
1. Florence King wrote about two of her fans who wanted to visit the neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where she had lived as a child. But that area had since been made over into a Combat Zone, she wrote, and “It was all but guaranteed that two lone white women roaming around such a neighborhood would get into serious trouble.” [The Florence King Reader, p. 292]
That part about “two lone white women” reminded me of this: In November 1944, a St. Louis newspaper reporter advised residents of the 5100 block of Kensington Avenue in St. Louis that they might see two white women, smartly dressed and wearing mink coats, walking through their alley at leisure some day that week. They had made such a walk a few years earlier, and they might do it again.
It was a sentimental journey: They were trying to recapture a part of their happy childhood. “Everyone had told us not to go back, that we’d find things changed”, one of them said. “But it really didn’t look so different to us. We took only a casual look at the fronts of the houses anyway. We were mostly concerned with the alley and the cherry tree that had been chopped down. We walked along and looked at the ash pits and Helen said, ‘Remember how mad we used to get because one of the other girls had a bigger ash pit than you had?’”
The two women were Sally Benson and her best childhood friend. She was in St. Louis that week in 1944 (as was Judy Garland) for the world premiere showing of the motion picture “Meet Me in St. Louis”, which was based on her memories of growing up on Kensington Avenue in the early 1900s. (Clarissa Start, “Hers Was a Happy Childhood. Sally Benson Revisits Scenes of ‘5135 Kensington Avenue ’”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 22, 1944)
That neighborhood was not wealthy. It was a modest and decent residential neighborhood. It was still that way in 1944, which is why two white women could walk through an alley without fear. But by 1994 her childhood home had been abandoned, boarded up, and then demolished. How many smartly-dressed white women would walk through that alley today in the same frame of mind – i.e., with no concern for their safety? In other, once-decent residential neighborhoods in St. Louis, an 89-year-old white man walking through an alley in 2006 was viciously attacked and beaten, and a 72-year-old Asian man walking through an alley with his wife in 2011 was viciously attacked and beaten by a black thug. Why is that? Because “The Law” today is a poor imitation of what it was in 1944 – because white men surrendered their authority.
2. Why do sidewalks exist? People who visit or work in downtown St. Louis must now watch for automobile traffic while walking in the street along one city block whose sidewalk has been closed to pedestrians “for health and safety reasons”. (N.B. For “safety reasons”, pedestrians must walk in the street with traffic. Only people who are brain-dead could conceive such nonsense.) “The Law” did that because lowlifes had been using that sidewalk as a bedroom and bathroom – because “The Law” is too spineless to stop them from doing that and to defend the rights of responsible, taxpaying citizens who don’t use it for that purpose – because “The Law” is not what it once was – because white men surrendered their authority. Law-abiding citizens yield to barriers placed there by the police, who yield to the courts, who yield to the bums. Such idiocy is beyond description.
—— Comments —–
Terry Morris writes:
And it does not matter what we’re called – “too controlling,” “over-protective,” “authoritarian,” “no-nonsense,” etc., as if to say that any one of these descriptions, as defined by our antagonists, is bad – there remains one choice to those of us still unwilling to allow our families to be flushed down the sewer pipes along with the rest of society.
