The Coward You Have Become

The Coward You Have Become

C.S. Humble

I have for many years tried to reach men through the artifice of fiction. Specifically, through the Western. I believed that harkening back to the stories your fathers and grandfathers relished, like my father and grandfathers, would provide me an avenue to communicate with you. Through stories of grand romance and adventure, by appealing to that which I believe is noble and best inside the heart of every man, I built a narrative about the trials men go through. Discussed the uncertainty of what it means to become a man and the rituals and ceremonies required of them by culture and place and time. I believed that by striking hard at your imagination, that you might discover once again the virtuous boys living inside the coward you  have become.

I have, over the course of those writing years, indirectly appealed to virtue and courage and honor, the masculine panoply that populist male heroes have so vigorously touted in their essays and speeches and lionizing memoirs. In my stories I built for you not only a hard place that might give rational excuse the hard choices required by hard times and hard landscapes, but also a retinue of complex male characters who suffered from the self-same inadequacy living inside the heart of every man. 

I know there is a violence living inside you, it lives in me too. A lust for blood and treasure, glory and acclaim. Either by biology or culture or self-excuse, you robe yourself in counterfeit power. Without it you feel naked. Emasculated.You make for yourself desolation and you call it peace. You adore the black and white (and now colorized) footage from the great wars you believe you would have served in and, dripping in ribbons and brass, come out the other side of a victor as your ancestors did. You watch films like Patton and Apocalypse Now and quote them unironically. You seek out military drone footage on internet forums so that you can, for a moment, embrace your unquenchable thirst to see dominance set upon the Other. You wade into social media, prowling to find a woman who needs to be put in her place. And the violence living within you put into plain sight the smallness of self which in the sunlight of your delusion casts an elongated shadow of who you truly are.

“Your body, my choice.”

“Cry more, Lib.”

“Fuck your feelings.” 

You attack women because you know you can win.

Because you have always won.

And, to you, there is nothing these crying bitches and sluts and whores can do about it.

Men win. That is the way of the world.

You love it. 

You love to save your shame and kill your glory. 

I need you to read this. I need you to know: The violence inside you is the poison of the world. 

You see yourself as a soldier in some grand cultural movement that might bring about the renaissance of a better time. You use your inherent gift for meanness and cruelty as a cudgel, and you will shatter the social and emotional and physical limbs of any and every woman who tries to assert a primacy on your world. Your vision of the world is filled with docile, breeder wives who serve and do not speak and war-like fraternity gatherings where each of you smoke and drink around the barrel charcoal fire while regaling one another with stories of misremembered youth or the low-calorie despair of all the hardships you allegedly endured. There, in that suburban barony where you rule entirely and are governed by a fascist state supporting your dominance, you will raise sons to be monsters and daughters to willing submit to the invisible lash braided by the world you helped build.

And for many of you, this is not how you see yourself, but it is who you have become. You have run from joy for the sake of selfish happiness. You have thrown out the common sense of Thomas Paine, Jefferson and Adam’s liberty, the fire of Teddy Roosevelt, disabused yourself of Lincoln’s scrutiny. Mark Twain, H.L. Menken, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, these titans of educated American thought, they are all of them notions in your mind rather than the intellectual guideposts, their shape so vague you could not pick them out of a philosophical line-up. You cannot be made a witness to their words and dreams clearly because men just like you made sure you would only see them at a distance. And because of this, the beauty of those thinkers, the ideas that might have so quickly destroyed your racism and elitism, greed and brutality were never allowed to heal the darkest places of your soul.

You have proven that you would rather live under the monarchy of a rapist, rather than share this country’s illimitable resource with women. You would rather burn the American experiment than share the discovery of fire. 

Not because you are strong, but because you are weak. Not because you were brave enough to stand, but because, in truth, nothing makes you happier than to kneel.  

And in this way, you have chosen violence. 

It is all you know.

Mark my paraphrase of the writings of Tolstoy, and the message of Jesus Christ: 

He who lives by the sword, will die by the sword.

And when that violence arises, when you become panic-stricken by the world you have made, I can assure you, you will have to kill me first.