Large Fierce Mammal

“De parabel der blinden” (The Parable of the Blind) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568. “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” ~ Matthew 15:14 (KJV)

“To be a Man possessed of Masculinity, experiencing the near daily necessity to engage in social intercourse or commerce with the unschooled males abroad in the land today, is to know the reality in the spirit of the other of what, “… feels inherently unreal ….”. To be unsurprised at a society proclaiming the necessity to “redefine” what it means — or more accurately should mean — to be Masculine when those uttering the proclamation never knew what it meant to begin with.” ~ Masculinity is a Guided Hunt

Tonight’s Dark Sentiment was originally intended to be part of my musings on Masculinity. In fact, I concluded our last conversation on the subject with the quote above, and the promise that my subsequent offering would, “… highlight the first of two, regrettably not so exceptional, examples of Masculinity lost in the wilderness wherein the blind but well meaning were called upon to lead the blind.”

I am, if nothing else, a Man of my Word, but I must tell you tonight that up to now I have been unable to deliver on that particular promise. The reason — it’s hard to write when you’re blisteringly angry. So this is finally being released, as far as I can release it, and while I customarily recommend a libation to pair with my servings, all I can suggest tonight is the thickest oven mitts you have available. Winter, as you know, is coming, and I am far from done with this offal. I therefore beg your indulgence.

So tonight I would present the figurative head of Will Leitch on a figurative platter … the matter of sports writer Will Leitch in his ineffectual travails as the sperm doner in the creation of father of two sons. By now, I would expect that the lower case “f” will not be lost on you.

Will Leitch eloquently turned his confusion at the meaning of Masculinity into an article published to The Cut under the title I’m not sure what to think about what my dad tried to teach me. So what should I teach my sons?

The piece begins, as you might expect from the title, with a recounting of the tale of what happens when a decidedly adult instrument is misapplied in an attempt to orchestrate a Rite of Passage. This is typical when the Mentor comes to the task of Mentoring cognizant of the goal, but absent personal knowledge, or even interest, in the chosen instrument, its application, and its actual meaning in the context of achieving the aforesaid goal.

For Mr. Leitch, the Mentor was his father, and the instrument was a firearm:

“Sometime around 1987, my father tried to teach me how to shoot a gun. It was a Winchester Model 37, 20-Gauge shotgun that had been in the family for years but had been encouraged to be unpacked from mothballs by a fellow electrician who had a son about to enter high school like me, and it was agreed upon by all that Bryan’s bookish son needed to learn to hunt.”

Taking a page from the record of my own ascent to Manhood, the exhortation on the part of Bryan Leitch’s fellow tradesmen to introduce his “bookish” prepubescent son to hunting came as no surprise.

“As a child, I became a voracious reader with wide ranging interests in all things scientific. I was the first member of the Whynacht Clan to ever finish high school, and go on to university, and it was my studious nature coupled with my academic success that piqued the interest of (my paternal Grandfather) Clem’s nasty side. He viewed my pursuit of knowledge as evidence of effeminacy and homosexuality, notwithstanding any other supporting proofs to the contrary ….” ~ Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 27 – The Last Word

To my mind and experience, this equating of a studious and “bookish” nature with a dearth of Manhood, even effeminacy, is far from uncommon, even as it flies in the face of what Rudyard Kipling once wrote — “A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition” — and highlights a lack of understanding of just how any of those components might factor into the continuum of Masculinity.

Leitch the Younger continues —

“I’d never seen my father hunt, he’d never talked about hunting, and I’d never seen a gun in the house before. But one day I came home from school, and Dad was home early, waiting for me with that gun. “Time for you to learn this,” he’d said.

We were both shivering; it was freezing in rural Mattoon, my tiny hometown in southern Illinois, closer to Kentucky than Chicago, but it wasn’t just that. Unsteady and unsure of himself, he loaded a bullet into the chamber and told me to aim somewhere deep into one of the endless cornfields that make up whole swathes of this country still, the sort of vast expanse that you can fire a rifle blindly into and not worry about hitting anything anyone would ever notice. I told him I did not want to. He nodded gently and said he knew that but I had to fire anyway. I wanted to make him happy, or least not make him mad, so I held the gun out in front of me, with dinosaur arms, put my finger on the trigger and, holding my breath and biting my lip so hard that my braces started to crank and ache, pulled it.

The kickback was so powerful and immediate that it sent the weapon flying behind me, but what I most remember was the sound. The whole world screamed blinding white; I didn’t even hear my father scramble behind me to pick the rifle off the ground. He was ashen — plainly terrified, even though nothing that bad had actually happened. I must have looked stricken, too, because he put his arm around me and, for one of the few times I can remember, apologized. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I know you didn’t want to, but I thought it was something that a man was supposed to do. It wasn’t.” He smiled. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to do that either.”

At least I think this is what he said: My ears were still screaming. Neither one of us ever fired a gun again.”

I’ll take a moment now to ask those among my following who are skilled in the use of firearms to quell your rising gorge at the compendium of inaccurate nomenclature, form, breaches of basic safety, and criminal negligence inherent on that quoted segment, and focus instead on taking solace in its final sentence — “Neither one of us ever fired a gun again.”

Solace, that is, until tonight when I will ask you to fill a flagon with your most spite abating libation and listen to the interview embedded here.

Until next time Goode Reader.