Nice Guy Nation

Hi, B.W.! My take on what The Shadow wrote is not that he’s unreservedly applauding the depiction of masculinity in 300. Rather, my interpretation is that a masculine man groks and deeply values genuine freedom.

Precisely, Sunni. My take is that the film (as well as Miller's graphic novel) forsakes historical accuracy for the sake of making exactly that point. Braveheart and Gladiator did exactly the same thing, and I found those films inspiring as well.

Did your read my opening paragraphs? I mentioned the differences between historical Sparta and the anachronistic idea of freedom put forth (albeit inconsistently)"by the movie as such" precisely to head off just such a discussion. Perhaps I should have been clearer.

As I tried to point out, historical Sparta was an extreme example of a police state and the Greeks in general had no concept of the worth of the individual apart from the state. The movie touches on this, but then largely attempts to overlay the modern ideal of freedom over the facts of history (in exactly the same way as was done in movies such as Braveheart and Gladiator, and for the same reason).

Is the movie artistically imperfect, a bit confused and historically inaccurate? Certainly. Is V for Vendetta a better movie that more accurately depicts what you and I believe about freedom? Most definitely. I don't know what the critics have said about the film because I haven't read any of them, but anyone who views the film and knows anything at all about ancient Greece must surely recognize that the view of freedom set forth in the movie is historically inaccurate and anachronistic. It is to the degree that the movie puts forth this inaccuracy that it is inspiring in the measure which I've discussed, and anyone who can concede that the movie is historically inaccurate on that point should have no issue with what I've written (at least upon the suppression of individuality for the sake of the state).

I suggest you see the film for yourself. You still may not agree with my take on it, but you'll certainly see why my little piece here need not be based upon statist premises, as you have implied.

It's probably not a great idea to react to something I haven't seen, and for that I apologize. I'm just having a hard time separating the concept of the masculine individual from what sounds like a celebration of the underdog military state against the barbarian hordes. But I can understand how, within the confines of a historically incorrect and potentially propagandistic story, some nuggets of positive truth might be found, and you've found them. I guess I'd just be happier if the story was about 300 actually free men defending their way of life instead of 300 Spartans under the illusion they are free.

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Thanks for the link; I hadn't seen it. Your comments are dead-on, and they do in fact dovetail nicely into the point I was trying to make, as well as some things I intend to post here in the future.

Are there film buffs who seriously assert Tom Hanks is a modern equivalent of Jimmy Stewart? If so, the mind boggles. Hanks has turned in some decent portrayals in my opinion, but he doesn't come close to Jimmy Stewart.

Yep, me among them.

Not in terms of acting ability but in terms of the roles they choose to play.

Just as one example, if _Mr._Smith_Goes_To_Washington_ were to be filmed today (not as a remake, but as an actual never-seen-before original), I could see Hanks taking the role and sort of making it work. I can't think of too many other current actors who could pull off the part.

Jimmy still had way more acting chops than Tom could ever hope for.

Getting back to the topic, THAT role is classic old-school male assertiveness for you. And not a single Rambo-type explosion or flying drop kick or justified execution to be seen.

There is a car chase though. And some implied gore.

I can agree with that in the context of roles. I was thinking in terms of acting ability – hence my surprised response. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Let's transpose your logic into another case and see if it holds:


The claim that the sick can benefit from a knowledgable doctor is simply false. Knowledgable doctors such as Joseph Mengele and Jack Kevorkian were complete unmitigated horrors as far as health is concerned.


How exactly did we gain what liberty we have in the US, pray tell? Strong assertive men took it for themselves; "Give me liberty or give me death" asserted aggressive old Patrick Henry.


What are men to do when their rights are not respected? By what means shall they gain such respect?


And your daughter considered the movie to be "anti-Iran" because the Greeks fought against the Persian Empire? I suppose the movie could have had the Spartans fighting the Nazis or some other group of politically-correct or fictional baddies, but that would have been quite a departure from the historical Battle of Thermopylae...

"I suppose the movie could have had the Spartans fighting the Nazis or some other group of politically-correct or fictional baddies, but that would have been quite a departure from the historical Battle of Thermopylae..."

Well, as long as they've already departed from historical Sparta ...

I guess Jorge is onto where I was trying to go. Because I aim to model the masculinity of guys like Gandhi and Thoreau, am I not a manly man? Is Patrick Henry's manliness really analogous to the kind of manhood depicted in 300? And, off the point but an important tangent, why pick this moment in history to release a movie about battling Persia/Iran?

"What makes a real man" is an important subject worth discussing; I'm just not sure this film is a very good launchpad for that discussion.

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Frank Miller's Sin City was released about two and a half years ago and was a smash hit. It's taken him that long to produce and release the next movie based on his work which happened to be the graphic novel 300--which he did long before the present situation in the Middle East.

Gandhi's methods worked against the British at that point in time because England had developed something of a conscience and respect for the rights of India. If he'd used against those same methods against--say--Joseph Stalin, the results would have been quite different.

I'm not so sure the point of my piece is considered an important subject worth discussing around here, since most seem to be more interested in challenging my interpretation of the film.

And it seems to happen fairly frequently ’round here. Given the overall contentiousness surrounding that film, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find it seeping in here as well.

More to the point, I wonder if there’s some kind of semantic disconnect going on here. The Shadow wrote, “Liberty demands them [strong assertive men]”, and Jorge appears to object to that assertion. But it seems to me that if liberty is to survive, it does require individuals willing to stand up to encroachments upon their liberty. How else to defend it?

We can debate and discuss and dissect methodology to our heart’s content – and I would enjoy a civilized consideration of the generalizability of Gandhi’s methods, as a topic distinct from this one – but those are sidetracks. Is there anyone reading this who wouldn’t consider Gandhi a strong or assertive man in at least a few respects? He stood up to the sizable British military presence in India without guns of his own! That takes serious cojones, does it not?

There is more to strength than might. There is more to assertiveness than being overbearing.

What Jorge said.

I'm a little sorry I sidetracked the discussion and may have chased The Shadow away from his own thread, but this has been interesting.

We seem to be in general agreement that strong wills are needed to preserve/restore liberty, and the discussion over "what is strength" is valuable. Shadow makes some great observations, which should not be lost, about how The Powers That Be appreciate it when we don't exercise our strength. We need to be ever vigilant that we haven't let our wills deteriorate into a passive acceptance of tyranny at any level.

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Since any human endeavor requires at least one strong willed human ... it is simply a tautology to say that Liberty requires it. But I grant that it does.

I suppose it depends upon what one means by the word “endeavor”, but I can think of several activities that do not require a strong-willed individual. Remaining oblivious to toxic elements of one’s society for oneself as well as any children one has ... continuing to serve The Massa-State by absorbing opinions from USSA Today and regurgitating them in conversation and the voting booth ... in this country, sadly, strong-willed humans above toddler age are vanishing, except perhaps in pockets where self-reliance and integrity are still valued, or where an individual chooses to swim against the conforming current surrounding him- or herself.

Strong assertive men with no concept of rights do not contribute to Liberty. And very possibly weak timid individuals who write well and understand human rights contribute even more than the strong assertive type who blindly charges the cannon. History leaves out the stories of all the nobodies who contributed to the cause. Without them, just like without the strong willed leaders, no human endeavor would come to pass. For good or ill.

You are of course correct in the first sentence quoted here. With your second assertion, though, it seems to me that we’re back to the point I attempted to address yesterday, that being that strength is not just might. Nor is strength necessarily mindless. In times such as ours, an individual does need some strength of character to write perspectives that oppose the regime – even more to distribute them. Leaders are perhaps the most easily recognized of strong-willed individuals, but I would say that all who choose to contribute to a minority movement are strong in ways that those in the complacent majority (such as the one I described above) will never be, as long as they remain complacent, unprincipled, and unthinking. And much of history is little more than glorified gossip, allowing us to tell who got the most press (very loosely defined) way back when.

I don’t think The Shadow was trying to define “a real man” any more than I was in the ramble I linked to in a comment above; and I am quite certain that he recognizes and values strength in women as well as in men. (I doubt we’ll see him again in this discussion since it has largely focused on tangents to his post, rather than its primary point.) In my reading of his post, I see an implicit recognition of the fact that it has largely been men who have been the innovators and inventors driving human advancement, at least according to our current “glorified gossip”—and if anyone reading this thinks that by making that statement I am automatically and necessarily some kind of sexist, please read this. From that context, The Shadow offers evidence of the emasculation of the Amerikan male. I understand his point to be that Amerikan men – as a group – have changed over the past 30–40 years in ways that are not conducive to human advancement (and yes, of course there are individual exceptions to that). Moreover, it is particularly harmful to the advancing of liberty. I don’t see any statement that explicitly – or even implicitly – suggests that women aren’t wanted, needed, or appreciated for their contributions to freedom, nor that a woman cannot be strong or assertive.

Has it really come to this? Is Amerikan society so overly sensitized to the political correctness infesting sex differences that no conversation focusing on one sex can escape being interpreted as a slam against the other sex — even on an individualist site?

When differences within a given sex vary more widely than differences between the average qualities of each sex, if we can even meaningfully define that, then I don't think it's a matter of oversensitivity or political correctness to point out this out.

True enough. However, the amount of variation around some measure of central tendency doesn’t make that measure less informative in and of itself, particularly when what’s being discussed are population-level measures (viz., very large sample sizes). It just provides more context for understanding exactly what that mean or median (or whatever) is saying. Variability does not invalidate an average.

But ... I didn’t see your spot-on observation being asserted anywhere in previous comments.

Time taking a shower is some of my best thinking time, and I spent my entire shower thinking about this- do endeavors in support of Liberty require strong men?

The Shadow wrote: The government fears a nation of strong, free-thinking masculine men; liberty is not a characteristic of a Nice Guy Nation; how will men who live in fear of their own wives stand against the oppression of the state?

Well, counterintuitive though it may be, I actually know of at least one such man. He outwardly acknowledges that he has opened himself up to a lifetime of balls in a jar joke over the way he allowed his wife and, after they split, ex-wife to run roughshod over him. Yet he has a brilliant, quiet, simple way with words that allows him to boil down certain principles of liberty to just a sentence or two that he will quietly share from time to time. I've learned that when this person speaks, one's best course of action is to just shut up and hear what he has to say. He's not loud, he's not assertive, he's not what I'd call strong in most ways and certainly not in a stereotypically masculine way, but there he is making his contributions to promoting liberty. He's a good example that you don't need to fight for advocate or promote it.

Now, on another note, why is this a "guy" thing? If I am wrong and what really is required is strength, is this not also required of women? And if we are associating strength with masculinity, does that mean that we need women to become more masculine? If not, what is "women's place" in the freedom movement (assuming we want to lump people based on sex which does not make sense to me in this particular instance)?

I am not sure that this is about a "guy" thing as much as it is about the socially accepted emascualtion of men's power.

I am probably not explaining this well, so bear with me.

I am attracted to strong women. Not in the sense that that they can bench press half their own weight and then go out and run a marathon, but in the sense of standing up for themselves. Because of the people I choose to hang out with, I run into a lot of them. Something that I am very thankful for as a red blooded hetrosexual male.

But there are some women who can only define their own power if it comes at the expense of someone else. Thus, they believe they can't be strong unless men around them are prevented from being strong. Using the force of law if necessary.

It starts early these days. Little boys aren't supposed to play cops and robbers. Pre-teenage males are being fed mood altering drugs to make them placid. And when those kids get to adulthood, the ways that they are supposed to express themselves is limited. The Shadow's original entry did a pretty good job of listing some examples.

I'm all for partnership between strong people. But I don't believe the true spirit of women's freedom is about subjecting men to tight control.

Although going by some of the statements of feminist leaders, it is certainly supposed to be.

A while back I did a review of Shelby Steele's _White_Guilt_ and how the assumptions he talks about influenced not only the Civil Rights Movement but set the stage for the whole power-from-victimhood thing that STILL shapes American society to this very day. If anyone is interested, here is the link.

http://www.paganvigil.com/C49491493/E20060708004835/index.html