Incubus is a derivative work, not an original research project. This book is an attempt to employee the study of violence in Baltimore, a life in combat sports, and a reading of military history, epic poems and religious texts to the question of emasculation. This reading is skewed toward Western literature and those Western cultures which have supported prize-fighting traditions. The arrogance of writing a book in two weeks has necessitated an amendment of my operating theory if I am to complete this in the timeframe promised to the raging psychopathic nerd that drinks embalming fluid in the back of my mind. My theory on emasculation—being as open to reinterpretation as my theory of the perfect female body—began 11 days ago as:
1. Postmodern First World men are far more thoroughly emasculated than they understand.
2. That this is reflected in the diminished social status of the peculiarly masculine traditions of honor
3. That white and black Americans have been emasculated along separate though roughly parallel tracks
4. Hierarchal institutions have steadily eroded the various masculine cults of honor and thereby compromised masculinity to the point of social emasculation.
I think the case is strong for 1-3. But having reread Chapter 6 I am of the opinion that I have disproven number 4 and am abandoning that premise at this point. My rereading of Gilgamesh, Beowulf and Crow Killer over the course of the last week has convinced me that what I mistook as a lineal end game erosion of honor and masculinity by the greater society is really a cyclic phenomenon, with the hierarchies in question promoting alternative honor cults better suited for domesticating men and rendering them as manageable in a collective sense as women naturally are.
Chapter 7 is now outlined as 14 bookmarks and is more of a survey of honor interplay and social emasculation than a case for what I perceived until a few days ago as a ‘collective dishonor versus autonomous honor’ struggle. This perception seems to have been a reflection of my personal prejudice, as that view—upon reflection—runs counter to the obvious cyclic aspects of the process identified by this self-same knucklehead at the outset.
So, rather than making the depressing case that we are at an honor-shorn masculinity end time I suggest we are at a low point in a cycle. Before continuing along this line of inquiry I would like to point out just how far we have fallen as men in terms of our access to honor in comparison to the primal man, the hunter/warrior.
For ages, in all societies I have studied, a man’s claim to honorable status was at base—and at the apex of human interaction—the keeping of his word; the concept of the ‘word’ as bond. The ancient Greeks, who were honor fanatics, whose word for the virtues of a warrior, Arete, requires the best scholar over 500 words to describe, regarded ‘the word’ as sacred. The life of ‘the word’ was closely aligned to the search for divinity. In American culture the handshake came to serve first as an adjunct to the word as bond and then as a surrogate.
Who in our time is permitted to be honored by all—as opposed to receiving a specified honor from some collective body?
Who is the functionary in our hierarchy who may be called—indeed must be called by the beseeching human cipher—‘your honor’?
A judge. And what is a judge but the most honorable of the single least honorable profession, the lawyer. While the least honorable of this least honorable profession become politicians and make laws, their marginally less evil brothers interpret and enforce these laws. And what has been the effect of the resulting litigious society?
One’s word is no longer his bond—the sacred basis for man-to-man bonding undermined by these vipers in robes. And a hand shake is at best a quaint convention and generally regarded as a fool’s hope.
Autonomous deed-based honor and the honor cults of society and race are as ever in contrast with the more materialistic economic and hierarchal-based notions, but have now been submerged to such a degree that an extreme imbalance is in evidence. Before continuing to the sections on honor interplay consider these two contrasting examples of honor interplay from recent U.S. military history, the battles of the ‘Chosen Few’ in the wintry mountains of North Korea in 1951-2, as related to the author by 2 surviving marines, and the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 as related by Sergeant David Bellavia in House to House, possibly the best combat memoir ever written.
Mister Mallory and his best friend spoke of how fortunate they were to be members of the Marine Corp and not the army. For, even as the U.S. army was overrun, routed and humiliated by the Chinese, the marines found themselves under the command of an organization that abided by operational principals that were compatible with the individual fighting man’s sense of honor; that he not be asked to leave his dead and wounded behind, that ‘bugging out’ was unthinkable. The marines admitted that they were no better men than the army soldiers, but rather were better served by their organization’s commitment to honor, as well as the practical matter of fighting in perimeter formation instead of in line. Their commander was out there getting shot at and cussing out reporters who accused him of retreating, rather insisting that since he was surrounded he was just advancing in a more practical direction.
The performance of the U.S. Marine Corp in the fighting retreat from the Chosen Reservoir was a classic example of the sense of honor held by a large hierarchy being in sync with the sense of honor vested in expected behavior and camaraderie held sacred by the individual fighting man and his society, a three-tiered symbiotic interplay of honor; of crucial masculine values applied under the harshest possible conditions.
53 years later, in a jihadist fortress city in Iraq, U.S. Army sergeant David Bellavia and his men fought house to house and hand to hand for an entire week. In this battle for which the U.S. Marines received the lion’s share of credit, Bellavia and his men gave an incredibly tough account of themselves against ‘an Islamist all star team’ of doped-up and heavily armed suicide fighters.
The commanding general wanted to come into what was left of the bunker city to have a photo session with the survivors of this unit. The men were covered with sores and starving, not having eaten a hot meal in a week. Before being permitted to eat hot food they had to stand with the general. Before being permitted to stand with the mangina general they had to shave—their skin off! Then, when they were done appearing for the general’s ‘dog and pony show’ they came to understand that the general’s cronies had already eaten the food.
This is a story that goes back to Agamemnon and Achilles at Troy, with the general’s feminized comfort-based sense of cozy privilege-as-honor taking precedence over the warrior’s very basic functional code of honor. As with the disastrous nine year battle for Troy that trashed the invader’s economy at home, militaries whose honor code and operational considerations fall too far out of sync from the warrior’s necessarily practical code will pay dearly either in terms of men, material or morale in struggles to come. The current U.S. price for running such soulless corporate style wars is a pool of demoralized and embittered veterans having returned home and still wondering 'why' as the victories their brothers died to win have literally been surrendered.
