“Astronomy fought for its life against astrology, but finally succumbed in the second century A.D. And everywhere the Hellenistic world worshipped Tyche, the great god Chance.”

-Will Durant, on the Age of the Diadochi [2]

I was taking a break from writing, doing the dumbbell routine and shadowboxing and wanted some music on the laptop to accompany my herky jerky lurch. I selected Burden in My Hand by Audioslave and was hit with a commercial. These are usually hip hop commercials, the You Tube gods seemingly convinced that any lesser music is a steppingstone to the rarified heights of angry bitch rap.

But what assaulted me was the announcement that “the two best straw weights in the world” would be waging titanic battles on the UFC stage. They were women of course, or at least used to be, their forms now fully masculinized to the point of sexless imperfection. Of the last 5 UFC ads I have seen, 4 have been for female fights in which the rare attractive woman always loses, for any remaining curve of softness or blush of femininity is a race to the bottom of the MMA food chain.

I see MMA as a valuable device for forging men, for testing men in a well-rounded adult version of a schoolyard fight, a place where caged men might wage miniature war in a never-never land where no knives are drawn, no boot party is thrown, no concrete glass or syringe make the ground a place not to be. Make no mistake, it is the most demanding combat sport to stay on top of with so many ways to win and lose. But the commercialization of it has exceeded boxing, the sportsmanship taken the same dark road pointed out by the Louisville Lip a life time ago.

What began in the early 1990s as a revolt against delicate, feminized, ritual forms of show martial arts evermore marketed to women and children as a diversion has now become a forum where our most disciplined women might devolve into remorseless andybots.

No thanks.

The money hucksters who have convinced a generation of men to sit and watch rather than get up and do have joined the transgender parade, even permitting butchered men to join the freak show.

Pankration was once the ultimate expression in ancient Hellas. Then, as manhood declined, national armies gave way to mercenary armies, religion gave way to atheism and household slavery morphed into industrial slavery, pankration became the bully sport of braggarts, crude brutes grown rich in once sacred contests and now acting as parasites [the root of our term, a companion/bodyguard to a tyrant] to tyrants ruling populations which were no longer cultures and failed as mere populations to replace themselves…

Sound familiar?

Well, the Romans pressed the refresh button before the Hellenistic world totally imploded, unfortunately butchering the smartest human who probably ever lived [1] while he ciphered in the sand, but preserving enough of Hellenic culture in the minds of their slave teachers to seed a few renewals. That is what comes to mind when I see this modified female grinning cadaver-like around her mouthpiece through the wire of her cage, of the end of Hellas, when female philosophers prospered and atheistic schools of thought flourished, even as the Romans made men above the Tiber, in a land not yet defleshed of soil or soul.

1.

2. The Life of Greece, Greece and Macedon, 1939, Will Durant