Category: Real men
The Italian officers thought the old Greek was obsessed with his tomatoes.He was mapping their positions.
Kostas Papadimitriou was 67 years old in 1941 when the Axis occupation of Greece began and soldiers from three nations moved through Thessaloniki like weather — loud, consuming, inevitable. He was a retired postal clerk with a bad hip who grew vegetables on a narrow terraced lot at the edge of the city, overlooking the port and the lower military district.
He was, by every observable measure, a man running out of time peacefully.
His wife had died in 1938. His son was somewhere on the Albanian front and had stopped writing. He had no telephone. He attended church on Sundays and the market on Tuesdays and spoke to almost no one at length because there was almost no one left to speak to.
The occupying soldiers, when they noticed him at all, saw an old man with dirt under his fingernails who moved slowly and talked about the weather.
They were not wrong about any of that.
They were entirely wrong about what it meant.
Kostas had spent thirty-one years as a postal clerk. People tended to underestimate what that meant. A postal clerk in a port city reads the rhythm of a place the way a doctor reads a pulse — the volume of mail, its origin and destination, the patterns of what moved and when. He had processed military correspondence, commercial freight manifests, civilian letters during two wars and four governments. He understood, at an almost physical level, how large systems communicated with themselves.
And he understood that occupying armies were large systems that communicated constantly.
They sent supply convoys through the port. They billeted troops in requisitioned buildings whose addresses he knew by heart from thirty years of deliveries. They requisitioned fuel and food according to schedules that, once you had seen two or three repetitions, revealed their own logic.
From his terraced garden, with a clear view of the lower harbor road, Kostas watched.
He had always been a gardener. This was not a cover he constructed — it was simply what he did, and he continued doing it, which meant he had a natural reason to be outside at all hours, in all weather, moving slowly around a hillside plot with his eyes nominally on the soil.
He began keeping a second notebook.
His first notebook was what it appeared to be: a gardening journal. Planting dates. Soil observations. Notes on yield. He had kept one for fifteen years and the Italian officers who searched his house twice found it and were satisfied.
The second notebook was thinner and written in a compressed personal shorthand he had developed across decades of postal notation — abbreviations and symbols that looked, to anyone else, like the private record-keeping of an obsessive old man who had perhaps worked in paperwork too long.
He recorded convoy schedules. Troop movements through the lower district. The timing of harbor patrol changes. Which requisitioned buildings showed light after curfew, suggesting planning activity. Which roads saw unusual vehicle traffic before operations that became apparent only days later.
He didn’t know, at first, who would receive this.
He collected it because a man who spent thirty-one years not wasting information could not simply stop.
The connection came through the church.
A younger man named Stavros, who helped with the Sunday collection and occasionally brought Kostas vegetables from the market when the old man’s hip was bad, turned out to be carrying messages for a resistance cell operating out of the Jewish quarter of the city — a community that was, at that precise moment, beginning to understand the particular danger it faced.
Stavros didn’t ask Kostas directly. He mentioned, carefully, that certain people were trying to understand the port schedule.
Kostas went inside and came back with six weeks of notebook entries.
Stavros stared at the pages for a long moment.
“Can you explain this?” he asked.
Kostas explained it. The abbreviations, the symbols, the cross-referencing system.
Stavros listened. Then he said he needed to show it to someone.
He showed it to a former army signals officer who was coordinating intelligence for several resistance cells across northern Greece. The officer spent an evening with the notebooks and sent back a single written response.
Ask the old man if he can continue. Ask him if he needs anything.
Kostas sent back his own response.
Tell him I need a better pencil. The thin ones break.
The network sent him six pencils.
He continued for two years.
What made him effective was not bravery in any dramatic sense — it was precision and patience, the same qualities that had made him a good postal clerk. He did not speculate. He recorded only what he observed directly. He noted when something was unclear and marked it accordingly.
The signals officer, who had worked with resistance informants across three countries, later said that Kostas was the most methodologically reliable source he had encountered — not because he was trained, but because he had spent a career understanding that a misdelivered letter was worse than no letter at all.
The information he passed was used in several ways. Resistance cells adjusted movement patterns around convoy schedules he had documented. Jewish families were warned before roundup operations whose preparatory logistics he had noticed days in advance — unusual troop concentrations, supply requisitions inconsistent with routine garrison needs. He could not always interpret what he was seeing, but he recorded it accurately, and people who could interpret it did.
In March 1943, he observed something that took him several days to understand.
An unusual volume of rail traffic through the lower yards. Requisitioned civilian facilities near the station. A particular pattern of military police deployment he had not seen before, concentrated around the Jewish quarter.
He passed his notes to Stavros on a Tuesday.
On Friday, German forces began the systematic deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jewish population to Auschwitz.
He had seen it coming but had not known what he was seeing until it was already happening.
This was the fact he could never entirely make peace with.
He had the pieces. He had passed them on. Others had received them. And still over 45,000 people were taken.
He sat in his garden for three days and did not write anything.
Then he picked up the pencil and continued.
Because stopping would not undo what had happened, and the occupation had not ended, and there were still people in the city who could use what he could see from a hillside with tomatoes growing around his feet.
He was never arrested.
The Italian and then German authorities searched his house on four occasions across the occupation and found an old man’s gardening notebooks, a worn Bible, a photograph of his wife, and — on the final search — a letter from his son, who had survived the Albanian campaign and was in hiding somewhere in the mountains.
The letter was three years old.
The officer who conducted the final search handed it back to him without comment.
When liberation came in October 1944, Kostas was 70 years old with a worse hip and six pencils worn to stubs.
The resistance cell formally documented his contribution in a report submitted to the Greek government in exile. The report described him as a civilian intelligence asset whose sustained observation had provided operational intelligence across a 26-month period.
He received a letter of recognition that arrived two years after the war ended, delayed by the chaos of the civil war that followed.
He put it in the gardening notebook.
He continued gardening until 1951, when the hip finally made the terraced lot impossible.
He moved to a ground-floor apartment and grew herbs in pots on the windowsill and, by several accounts, remained extremely particular about his tomatoes until his death in 1957.
The signals officer who had received his notebooks wrote about him once, in a postwar memoir published in a small Athens edition that was never widely distributed.
He described finding the notebooks initially bewildering — pages of symbols and abbreviations from a man with no military training, no tradecraft, no apparent understanding of intelligence methodology.
Then he described realizing that the system wasn’t military.
It was postal.
Kostas had simply applied the logic of a man who spent his career making sure things arrived at the right place, at the right time, without being lost or misdelivered.
He had treated information about the enemy the way he had treated letters for thirty-one years.
Carefully. Accurately. Reliably.
Without wasting a single observation.
Editor’s Note: Today’s article is about Sgt. Darrell Powers, a World War II hero who served with the 101st Airborne Division. Nicknamed “Shifty”, Powers saw action in the American airborne landings in Normandy, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. Powers was more than “just” a soldier — he was also a gun guy. Ayoob shares the full story here.
Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book “Band of Brothers” was said to have done as much as Tom Hanks’ 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan” to remind later American generations of the heroism of our servicemen’s sacrifices for freedom in World War II.
The book was based on the recollections of individual paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, known as the “Screaming Eagles,” and particularly Easy Company. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg made it into a compelling HBO TV series that debuted in 2001. America felt it got to know those brave soldiers.
One of them was Sergeant Darrell “Shifty” Powers. His nickname didn’t carry the word’s usual meaning: he earned it in high school for his fast moves on the basketball court. Tall and athletic, he was also one of us: a “gun guy.” He was a hunter, a marksman and, in later life, an outspoken Second Amendment advocate and a daily concealed carrier for whom shooting was a beloved hobby until his passing at age 86.
A Hunter’s Eye
Powers was born and grew up in the hollows of rural Virginia, spending as much time as he could hunting on a mountain on his family’s property. He shot his first squirrel when he was a little boy. His father taught him to be alert to his surroundings in all ways: a subtle sound, an unexpected silence, and more. It was a skill that would save his life and other lives in combat.
In “Band of Brothers” Ambrose wrote of the day, December 29, 1944, when Easy Company was fighting its way out of the Battle of the Bulge, and Shifty noticed a distant tree that hadn’t been there the day before. Based on his observation, the Americans recognized a newly installed and camouflaged German artillery battery and called in American artillery on it, eliminating the threat.
The Guns of Shifty Powers
In his authorized biography by Marcus Brotherton, “Shifty’s War”, Powers mentioned that as a paratrooper he was issued a 1911 .45 auto with a shoulder holster and wore ten eight-round en-bloc clips of .30-06 on his belt to feed his M1 Garand. Shifty said, “Lot of guys used the carbine, you know, and some guys used Thompsons, but I always liked the M1 Garand best.”
It was a preference that remained throughout his life, even into his eighties when he was suffering macular degeneration and being treated for cancer. He told Brotherton, “Those treatments made me real weak. I liked to get out on the deck and shoot my rifle, you know. Nobody lived very close around our house, so it was okay. I couldn’t see to hit a target very well anymore, but I knew where they were. I didn’t hit them all the time, but I’d fire the gun and smell the smoke, so I’d enjoy that.”
“My M1 was my favorite rifle, but it got hard to lift, you know, and I told (my wife) Dorothy, ‘You know, that doggone rifle has gotten fatter since the war.’ Ammunition for M1’s was hard to come by, but my friends would bring me clips. I had a .22 with a scope, which helped me see the targets, so I’d shoot that every so often. Then I had a Lugar (sic) that I’d shoot, and a .22 pistol that I’d like to shoot. As a last resort I had a BB gun, and I’d take that out on the deck.”
The M1 he used in combat was not entirely stock. Shifty had filed the sear to achieve what he called a hair trigger. It was the rifle he used for his most famous shot of the war. Alas, it didn’t follow him all the way through the war. Stephen Ambrose explains in “Band of Brothers,” “Shifty Powers got a new M1. That was a mixed blessing. He had been using one issued to him in the States. He loved that old rifle. ‘It seemed like I could just point it, and it would hit what I’d pointed it at. The best shooting rifle I ever owned. But every time we’d have an inspection, I’d get gigged because it had a pit in it, in the barrel. You can’t get those pits out of those barrels, you know…’ He got tired of being gigged, turned it in and got a new M1. ‘And I declare, I couldn’t hit a barn with that rifle. Awful’est shooting thing there ever was.’”
“Shifty’s Shot”
That famous shot happened in January of 1945. Fighting their way out of the Battle of the Bulge, Shifty’s unit found themselves in the strategically placed town of Foy in Belgium. (Factoid: while Yanks pronounce that town’s name like it sounds, rhyming with “toy,” those who live there reportedly pronounce it “Fwah.”)
A fellow member of the Band of Brothers, Carwood Lipton, told the story this way: “One of the men in the 3rd platoon of E Company, 506th had excellent eyesight, and he was also an outstanding marksman with a rifle. He was Darrell C. ‘Shifty’ Powers, a tall part-Indian, from Clinchco, Virginia.”
“Shifty’s marksmanship paid off for us on January 13 when E company received orders to attack and clear the town of Foy. We moved around to the south of the town and attacked to the north into it. The Germans defended it strongly, and we had a number of men hit. At one point, several of us, including Shifty, Popeye Wynn (Shifty’s closest buddy), Bob Mann, R.B. Smith, and I were pinned down by a sniper that we just couldn’t locate. R. B. Smith caught a bullet in the leg. Then Shifty yelled, ‘I see ‘im.’ And there was a rifle shot. We weren’t pinned down any more so we continued the attack.”
“When things had cleared up later that day I went back to see where that sniper had been. When I found him, Popeye had already found him. We stood there looking down at the dead German and at the bullet hole centered in the middle of his forehead. Popeye looked over at me and said, ‘You know, it just doesn’t pay to be shootin’ at Shifty when he’s got a rifle.’”
The buildings the German and Shifty each fired from still stand. One researcher later determined the distance to be 66 meters.
Powers’ own memory of shooting a sniper in Foy differs somewhat. From the “Shifty’s War” book:
“More shots rang out. I glanced up then down again. The other man along the side of the building froze. The sniper kept firing. Our other guy didn’t stand a chance unless we could get that sniper. I ducked up again to get a bead on where the sniper fired from. He was about sixty feet away, shooting from around the corner of a brick building. I ducked down again and propped my M1 up on the window ledge. Seven rounds were left in my clip. I didn’t have time to properly aim. I fired from instinct, seeing in my mind the corner of that building where I guessed the German’s head to be. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. The dust flew off the brick at the corner of the building. I fired all seven rounds. No sound came from where the German sniper was. Our man found his feet again and checked the other man on the ground. The first man was dead. But the other was just fine. ‘Okay,’ I said with a nod. I thought maybe I saved that man’s life. It felt good.”
In the heat of infantry combat, when a soldier fires at an enemy and sees him go down, he will often never know whether his target was killed, wounded, or merely ducked. In his later years, writes Brotherton, “Shifty told his son-in-law, Seldon Johnson, that he had killed the specific number of eight men during the war. The specific line Seldon remembers was, ‘I know I killed eight men. It could have been more, but I don’t know for sure. People think they know what killing’s like, but they don’t.’”
Ironic Injury
Powers’ keen observation skills and superb marksmanship helped to make him one of the few men in the unit to get from D-Day almost all the way through the campaign without sustaining a single wound. The day came when he won a lottery to be sent home, and missing his family greatly, he used his prize.
He was in a truck taking him and other soldiers back from the front lines when a drunk driver crashed into the vehicle, killing one trooper and sidelining Shifty with a smashed pelvis and other severe injuries that left him hospitalized for almost a year.
A Vet of the Greatest Generation on 2A
Like many WWII vets, Darrell Powers returned home a staunch advocate of the right to keep and bear arms. While stationed in England prior to the D-Day invasion he had been horrified to see Brits drilling with picks and shovels to fight heavily armed German infantry should they invade, because so few of them privately owned firearms. (Indeed, Americans donated many of their personal guns for use by the British home guard.)
Says his biographer Marcus Brotherton, “Shifty recounted orally on several occasions his memory of seeing the people in Aldbourne practice defending themselves with only garden implements. During some of his public talks after the war, he made a strong case for maintaining the legality of privatized gun ownership in the United States. This issue was about the only time he ever made a public political statement. Shifty believed that citizens had a right to own guns to defend themselves … .”
The battle-hardened vet practiced what he preached when he came home, not only keeping but bearing arms. Shifty told Brotherton that he always carried a .25 auto on his ankle, just in case.
Cancer did what the Nazis could not and took Sergeant Darrell Powers in 2009 at the age of 86. Like so many of The Greatest Generation, this American hero left a legacy of the value of skill at arms and the importance of fighting for freedom.
Matt Damon is one of the most successful actors in Hollywood. He is 52 years old and has already starred in 85 movies. Google claims his net worth hovers around $170 million.
In general, I like Matt Damon’s movies. Elysium was great, as was, of course, Saving Private Ryan. Interstellar, The Martian, and the Ocean series never get old. And then there was Bourne.
Damon just nailed that one. He played a conflicted amnesiac assassin who, throughout four full-length films, traveled the globe gratuitously killing strangers while trying to discover who he really was. Matt Damon did a superb job of taking Robert Ludlum’s magnificent words and translating them into something we could experience on the big screen. I’ve seen them all several times.
Table of contents
Action Hero
As Jason Bourne, Matt Damon comes across as quite the bad man. His close combat skills both with weapons and without are pretty epic. Heck, he once killed a dude with a rolled-up magazine. Alas, however, that’s all just fake make-believe.
Out here in the real world, action movie star Matt Damon has little use for such stuff as private gun ownership. While interviewing in Australia, he was quoted as having said, “You guys did it here in one fell swoop and I wish that could happen in my country…It’s wonderful what Australia did…And nobody’s rights have been infringed, you guys are all fine.”
Damon’s Idea Of Freedom Smells Fishy
In 1996, Australia enacted sweeping gun control legislation that allowed the government to confiscate 650,000 guns from private citizens, effectively disarming most of the Australian populace. I spent some time in Australia soon thereafter back when I was a soldier. The Aussie gun nerds in uniform with whom I worked were mightily lamenting the irrevocable demise of their liberty.
My point is simply that Matt Damon is pretty typical. Most of those tough Hollywood studs are Big Government anti-freedom Leftists. Damon, for his part, is a committed supporter of the Democratic Party, having personally hosted a fundraiser for Elizabeth Warren. Mark Ruffalo (the Hulk) and Chris Evans (Captain America) are even farther Left. However, it was not always thus.
Origin Story of Sterling Hayden
Sterling Hayden starred in 59 films and 18 television programs. By all accounts, his was a fabulously successful Hollywood career. However, throughout it all, he was quick to explain that acting was just a means to an end for him. Sterling Hayden climbed up onto the big screen just to support his limitless adrenaline addiction. He started young.
Hayden was born Sterling Relyea Walter in 1916 in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. His dad died when he was nine, and his mom remarried. His stepdad, James Hayden, formally adopted him and changed his name to Sterling Hayden.
He dropped out of school at age sixteen to take a job crewing an oceangoing schooner. He traveled all around the Americas from New London, Connecticut, to Newport Beach, California. Along the way he ran a charter yacht and crewed a steamer to Cuba and back eleven different times. His first Captaincy was the square rigger Florence C. Robinson. At age 22 he commanded the Robinson on a 7,700-mile voyage from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Tahiti.
Newfound Success
Upon his return from Tahiti in 1938, Hayden had his photo fortuitously taken while participating in a Fisherman’s Race. This image ended up on the cover of a magazine and was seen by an executive for Paramount Pictures. That earned him an invitation to screen test for the movies.
Hayden stood 6 feet 5 inches tall and reliably filled a room. He got the part without really trying. Paramount later marketed him as “The Beautiful Blond Viking God.”
Hayden had this to say about his newfound success, “I was completely lost, ignorant, nervous. But the next thing I knew, Paramount made me a seven-year contract beginning at $250 a week, which was astronomical. I got my lovely old mother and bought a car, and we drove to California…I was so lost then I didn’t think to analyze it. I said, ‘This is nuts, but, damned, it’s pleasant.’ I had only one plan in mind: to get $5,000. I knew where there was a schooner, and then I’d haul ass.”
Sterling Hayden Goes To War
And then the world came unglued. With World War 2 looming large, Sterling Hayden abandoned Hollywood and enlisted in the Army. He was deployed to Scotland for training but suffered a severe ankle fracture and was medically separated from the military. He then returned home and tried to buy a schooner. However, he was unable to raise the cash.
Many guys who had been legitimately injured in military service might have just called it a day. However, that’s not the way Sterling Hayden was rigged. Once his ankle healed, he enlisted in the Marine Corps under an alias, apparently to avoid being tied to his previous injury.
A Strange Promotion
Hayden actually thrived at Parris Island and went straight from boot camp to Officer Candidate School. Once he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant, Hayden got a curious call from Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan. At the time, Donovan carried the misleading title, “Coordinator of Information.” With FDR’s backing, Donovan eventually birthed the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). The OSS was the precursor to today’s CIA. Sterling Hayden had just become a spy.
Still operating under the nondescript alias “John Hamilton,” Sterling Hayden–ship’s captain, shadow warrior, and movie star–was deployed to the Mediterranean to take the fight to the Nazis. And this he did…for the next three years.
Hayden lived and worked in enemy-held territory. He captained a motor launch running weapons, supplies, and ammunition to Yugoslavian partisans serving under Tito. Hayden parachuted covertly into Croatia to help organize resistance cells. He fought the Germans and Italians during the Naples-Foggia campaign and organized partisans into rescue teams to repatriate downed Allied fliers. By the end of the war, Hayden was a Captain.
American Silver Star
Now appreciate what that meant. This towering 6 foot 5 inch giant of a man masqueraded as a fisherman, running guns under the noses of the Nazis for years. He didn’t wear a uniform. At any moment he could have been discovered, captured, tortured, and killed. He earned the Bronze Arrowhead Device for parachuting behind enemy lines in combat. Josip Broz Tito recognized him with the Order of Merit for exceptional valor in action. He earned the American Silver Star for gallantry. The citation for the award read in part, “Lt. Hamilton displayed great courage in making hazardous sea voyages in enemy-infested waters and reconnaissance through enemy-held areas.” Wow. What a stud.
After the war, like so many millions of American veterans, Sterling Hayden came home. His wartime service overseas left him with a deep love and appreciation for his country. During one press conference, he said, “I feel a real obligation to make this a better country – and I believe the movies are the place to do it.”
Short Stint As A Communist
After having served so long alongside communist partisans in combat, Hayden came home with a bit of a soft spot for the Reds. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, this was an unpopular place to be politically. He briefly joined the American Communist Party but soon became disillusioned and left. He eventually testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, this time as a reformed communist. He later said, “The FBI made it very clear to me that, if I became an ‘unfriendly witness’, I could damn well forget the custody of my children. I didn’t want to go to jail, that was the other thing.”
Hayden found plenty of work in Hollywood. Some of his movies were better than others. In 1956, he starred in The Killing directed by Stanley Kubrick. This low-budget outing became a respected classic and eventually landed him a big part in Dr. Strangelove as the warmongering Air Force General Jack D. Ripper who tries to end the world. Throughout it all, however, Hayden acted just to pay the bills. 
Sterling Hayden Traveled The World
He eventually landed that schooner, The Wanderer, and used it to travel the world on the proceeds from his movies. After a particularly acrimonious divorce wherein he was awarded custody of his children, Hayden scooped up his four kids and struck out for Tahiti, defying a court order in the process. Eventually, he remarried and fathered another two sons.
Like most folks who hit it big, Hayden grew introspective later in life. He eschewed Hollywood, for the most part. He came out of retirement to do Dr. Strangelove as a favor for Kubrick. Whenever he described himself in his later years he claimed to be a sailor or writer rather than an actor.
The End For Sterling Hayden
Eventually, Sterling Hayden developed prostate cancer. That’s an eminently treatable condition today, but back in the early 1980’s, we did not have nearly so many good tools. He ultimately succumbed to the disease in 1986 at age 70.
Sterling Hayden was married to three different women. He traveled the world, faced death countless times, and then channeled a little bit of that extraordinarily manly life into his many movies. The Beautiful Blond Viking God was a Renaissance Man indeed.
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)
There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.**
We’re not like that anymore.
Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.
Now, men are taught that violence is bad — that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.
Now, men’s fashion includes not a man dressed in a double-breasted suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.
Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.
Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.
And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction — and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.
How did we get to this?
In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.
But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media — and mostly, this has not been a good thing.
When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (i.e. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.
I am aware of the fury that this statement is going to arouse, and I don’t care a fig.
What I care about is the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a concerted campaign to denigrate men, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them impotent, figuratively speaking.
I’m going to illustrate this by talking about TV, because TV is a reliable barometer of our culture.
In the 1950s, the TV Dad was seen as the lovable goofball — perhaps the beginning of the trend — BUT he was still the one who brought home the bacon, and was the main source of discipline (think of the line: “Wait until your father gets home!”).
From that, we went to this: the Cheerios TV ad.
Now, for those who haven’t seen this piece of shit, I’m going to go over it, from memory, because it epitomizes everything I hate about the campaign to pussify men. The scene opens at the morning breakfast table, where the two kids are sitting with Dad at the table, while Mom prepares stuff on the kitchen counter. The dialogue goes something like this:
Little girl (note, not little boy): Daddy, why do we eat Cheerios?
Dad: Because they contain fiber, and all sorts of stuff that’s good for the heart. I eat it now, because of that.
LG: Did you always eat stuff that was bad for your heart, Daddy?
Dad (humorously): I did, until I met your mother.
Mother (not humorously): Daddy did a lot of stupid things before he met your mother.
Now, every time I see that TV ad, I have to be restrained from shooting the TV with a .45 Colt. If you want a microcosm of how men have become less than men, this is the perfect example.
What Dad should have replied to Mommy’s little dig: “Yes, Sally, that’s true: I did do a lot of stupid things before I met your mother. I even slept with your Aunt Ruth a few times, before I met your mother.”
That’s what I would have said, anyway, if my wife had ever attempted to castrate me in front of the kids like that.
But that’s not what men do, of course. What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom.
You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.
When I first started this website, I think my primary aim was to blow off steam at the stupidity of our society.
Because I have fairly set views on what constitutes right and wrong, I have no difficulty in calling Bill Clinton, for example, a fucking liar and hypocrite.
But most of all, I do this website because I love being a man. Amongst other things, I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools — all the things that being a man entails. All this stuff gives me pleasure.
And it doesn’t take much to see when all the things I love are being threatened: for instance, when Tim Allen’s excellent comedy routine on being a man is reduced to a fucking sitcom called Home Improvement.
The show should have been called Man Improvement, because that’s what every single plotline entailed: turning a man into a “better” person, instead of just leaving him alone to work on restoring the vintage sports car in his garage. I stopped watching the show after about four episodes.
(The Man Show was better, at least for the first season — men leering at chicks, men fucking around with ridiculous games like “pin the bra on the boobies”, men having beer-drinking competitions, and women bouncing on trampolines. Excellent stuff, only not strong enough. I don’t watch it anymore, either, because it’s plain that the idea has been subverted by girly-men, and turned into a parody of itself.)
Finally, we come to the TV show which to my mind epitomizes everything bad about what we have become: Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Playing on the homo Bravo Channel, this piece of excrement has taken over the popular culture by storm (and so far, the only counter has been the wonderful South Park episode which took it apart for the bullshit it is).
I’m sorry, but the premise of the show nauseates me. A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” (i.e. more acceptable to women): changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music — for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?
Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.
You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? “Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.”
Real men, on the other hand, have big fucking mean-ass dogs: Rhodesian ridgebacks, bull terriers and Rottweilers, or else working dogs like pointers or retrievers which go hunting with them and slobber all over the furniture.
Women own lapdogs.
Which is why women are trying to get dog-fighting and cock-fighting banned — they’d ban boxing too, if they could — because it’s “mean and cruel”. No shit, Shirley. Hell, I hate the idea of fighting dogs too, but I don’t have a problem with men who do. Dogs and cocks fight. So do men. No wonder we have an affinity for it.
My website has become fairly popular with men, and in the beginning, this really surprised me, because I didn’t think I was doing anything special.
That’s not what I think now. I must have had well over five thousand men write to me to say stuff like “Yes! I agree! I was so angry when I read about [insert atrocity of choice], but I thought I was the only one.”
No, you’re not alone, my friends, and nor am I.
Out there, there is a huge number of men who are sick of it. We’re sick of being made figures of fun and ridicule; we’re sick of having girly-men like journalists, advertising agency execs and movie stars decide on “what is a man”; we’re sick of women treating us like children, and we’re really fucking sick of girly-men politicians who pander to women by passing an ever-increasing raft of Nanny laws and regulations (the legal equivalent of public-school Ritalin), which prevent us from hunting, racing our cars and motorcycles, smoking, flirting with women at the office, getting into fistfights over women, shooting criminals and doing all the fine things which being a man entails.
When Annika Sorenstam was allowed to play in that tournament on the men’s PGA tour, all the men should have refused to play — Vijay Singh was the only one with balls to stand up for a principle, and he was absolutely excoriated for being a “chauvinist”.
Bullshit. He wasn’t a chauvinist, he was being a man. All the rest of the players — Woods, Mickelson, the lot — are girls by comparison. And, needless to say, Vijay isn’t an American, nor a European, which is probably why he still has a pair hanging between his legs, and they’re not hanging on the wall as his wife’s trophy.
Fuck this, I’m sick of it.
I don’t see why I should put up with this bullshit any longer — hell, I don’t see why any man should put up with this bullshit any longer.
I don’t see why men should have become feminized, except that we allowed it to happen — and you know why we let it happen? Because it’s damned easier to do so. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed it to go too far, and our maleness has become too pussified for words.
At this point, I could have gone two ways: the first would be to say, “…and I don’t know if we’ll get it back. The process has become too entrenched, the cultural zeitgeist of men as girls has become part of the social fabric, and there’s not much we can do about it.”
But I’m not going to do that. To quote John Belushi (who was, incidentally, a real man and not a fucking woman): “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
Well, I’m not going to quit. Fuck that. One of the characteristics of the non-pussified man (and this should strike fear into the hearts of women and girly-men everywhere) is that he never quits just because the odds seem overwhelming. Omaha Beach, guys.
I want a real man as President — not Al Gore, who had to hire a consultant to show him how to be an Alpha male, and french-kiss his wife on live TV to “prove” to the world that he was a man, when we all knew that real men don’t have to do that pathetic crap.
And I want the Real Man President to surround himself with other Real Men, like Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, and yes, Condi Rice (who is more of a Real Man than those asswipes Colin Powell and Norman Mineta).
I want our government to be more like Dad — kind, helpful, but not afraid to punish us when we fuck up, instead of helping us excuse our actions.
I want our government of real men to start rolling back the Nanny State, in all its horrible manifestations of over-protectiveness, intrusiveness and “Mommy Knows Best What’s Good For You” regulations.
I want our culture to become more male — and not the satirical kind of male, like The Man Show, or the cartoonish figures of Stallone, Van Damme or Schwarzenegger.
(Note to the Hollywood execs: We absolutely fucking loathe chick movies about feelings and relationships and all that feminine jive. We want more John Waynes, Robert Mitchums, Bruce Willises, and Clint Eastwoods. Never mind that it’s simplistic — we like simple, we are simple, we are men — our lives are uncomplicated, and we like it that way. We Were Soldiers was a great movie, and you know why? Because you could have cut out all the female parts and it still would have been a great movie, because it was about Real Men. Try cutting out all the female parts in a Woody Allen movie; you’d end up with the opening and closing credits.)
I want our literature to become more male, less female. Men shouldn’t buy “self-help” books unless the subject matter is car maintenance, golf swing improvement or how to disassemble a fucking Browning BAR. We don’t improve ourselves, we improve our stuff.
And finally, I want men everywhere to going back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of the late Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: “To ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”
In every sense of the word. We know what the word “is” means.
Because that’s all that being a Real Man involves. You don’t have to become a fucking cartoon male, either: I’m not going back to stoning women for adultery like those Muslim assholes do, nor am I suggesting we support that perversion of being a Real Man, gangsta rap artists (those fucking pussies — they wouldn’t last thirty seconds against a couple of genuine tough guys that I know).
Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why date rape is supposedly such a problem on college campuses*? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?
It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.
Because only the strong men propagate.
And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.
And he won’t. Because Rummy’s been married to the same woman for fifty years, and he wouldn’t toss that away for a quickie. He’s a Real Man. No wonder the Euros hate and fear him.
We?d better get more like him, we’d better become more like him, because if we don’t, men will become a footnote to history.
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*since debunked as bullshit, based on crap statistics
**“I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.’ It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work. Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below! Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.”