The Other McCain

Edmund Burke famously wrote of the French Revolution, “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.” The truth of Burke’s warning to France was proven by subsequent events, and yet it seems we have learned nothing from the history of the past two centuries. Think about the consequences of the Sexual Revolution and modern feminism, which began in the late 1960s as the Women’s Liberation Movement. The catastrophic effects of “liberty to individuals” can scarcely be denied, and we can see this not only as statistical trends, but in particular cases. Some people are simply incapable of exercising prudent judgment, and their folly often inflicts heartbreaking pain on those unfortunate enough to be associated with such fools. In a post earlier this week (“What Causes Misogyny?”), I discussed the case of a man who discovered from a DNA test that his 15-year-old daughter was not actually his daughter, but rather the result of his cheating ex-wife’s affairs. What perhaps shocked me most in that tale was when the man told how, after discovering how he’d been deceived, he determined have nothing more to do with his ex-wife’s daughter — and yet allowed his mother to talk him into embracing the child as if she were actually his own! Some readers took issue with my opinion on that story, but Adam Piggott gets the point:

Three generations of women were lined up against the man — his mother, his cheating wife, and the girl who he had thought was his daughter. . . .
The man’s mother is the key figure here. She sided against her son. She took the side of the mother of the girl who was actually not her granddaughter. Now, I am sure that the vast majority of you are aware of what grandparents are like around their grandchildren and how they tend to lose their brains. Mind you, the grannies are the Boomers now so maybe that’s not a thing anymore.
Anyway, my point is that no-granny here took the side of team women even though every logical point ruled against her taking that position. But women are not logical. Even worse, they are out of control and slaves to their feelings. We have let them have unfettered access to their feelings and given those same feelings a measure of artificial importance.
Feelings lead to chaos which inevitably leads to destruction.
Women will always always go team woman if they have a say in the matter and if there are no social consequences for them to do so.

Of course, Adam over-generalizes here — not all women are hyper-emotional or irrationally devoted to Team Woman. Nevertheless, the point is how such irrationality makes family unity impossible.

One of the principles that my wife and I consciously applied in parenting our children (five of whom are now adults, and the youngest 16) was to have a United Front of parental authority. Children can be very shrewd in exploiting any potential division between parents, and if they can succeed in doing so, bad consequences predictably follow. Parents have to consult between themselves and reach agreement in terms of what the rules are for their children and how the rules should be enforced, because every child is a potential tyrant who will employ a divide-and-conquer strategy, unless faced with a resolute unity of adult authority.

My assumption, from the absence of any reference to the cuckolded man’s father in that tale, is that his parents either never married, or else they were divorced and he was raised under his mother’s authority — a “mama’s boy,” taught from earliest childhood to defer to women’s wishes, which may explain why his ex-wife had no respect for him.

Every man must be the judge of his own honor. That’s a point I’ve made in other contexts, where someone has insulted me and, when I call attention to the insult, they respond by saying that they didn’t intend to insult me — which is a further and arguably more grievous insult, in that they are now telling me that I have imagined the injury I’ve suffered, or perhaps that I deserved to be mistreated. Where I come from, that would get you a punch in the nose, or worse. I grew up around rednecks, and when a redneck tells you he is offended by something you said or did, you’re only going to make matters worse if you tell him he is mistaken.

The curious thing of my own experience is that (a) every fight I’ve been in as an adult involved a quarrel over a woman, and (b) I’ve never thrown the first punch. No, i was always getting sucker-punched by some fool who let himself be tricked into playing “White Knight.” My attitude was captured in a throw-away line Ronnie Van Zant stuck into the live version of “Gimme Three Steps,” where he says, “I ain’t fixin’ to die over no [vulgar term for a vulva].” It is as predictable as sunrise in the East, however, that when a woman gets her feelings hurt, she will conceive a plan of revenge, often without bothering to say anything to the person against whom she bears a grudge. Women seem to learn this attitude in childhood, squabbling amongst themselves on the elementary school playground, and many of them never grow out of this childish tendency, which often takes the form of being a gossipy tattletale: “Did you hear what So-and-So did? I’m going to tell teacher!”

Women doing that playground tattletale act can literally get men killed. She develops a grudge against a guy — for whatever reason, or no sometimes no discernible reason at all — and finds some fool who’s willing to play “White Knight” for her. The fool listens to her one-sided sob story about how this terrible man said or did something mean to her and, being a fool, the “White Knight” doesn’t doubt a word she tells him, nor even stop to consider whether her tale of grievance is plausible. No, sir, he’s a pretty girl crying, and he’s going to avenge her by whuppin’ the ass of the low-down scoundrel who done her wrong. Next think you know, he or the other guy ends up dead, and the one who’s still living is one his way to prison, and the judge don’t want to hear you sad story, pal. The jailhouse is full of fools with stories to tell, and there are men in the graveyard whose side of the story died with them. But I digress . . .

Every man must be the judge of his own honor, as I say, and if a man has been cuckolded by his wife, deceived into raising another man’s child, why would his own mother take side against him when he declares he wants nothing more to do with the child who is, from his perspective, the living symbol of his own humiliation? It is cruel to expect a man to endure such shame, but as Adam Piggott says, it’s “Team Woman.”

Apparently with no sympathy for her son, who has suffered a grievous wrong, his mother instead is full of gushy irrational feeling for the child who has been foisted upon her son by his ex-wife’s deception! It apparently does not occur to her that her son’s cheating ex-wife as also deceived her into imagining that this child was her granddaughter, and she permits her sentimental connection to the child — now a teenager — to trump “every logical point” in favor of her son’s position.

Feelings are more important than facts to Team Woman, and we must pity this poor guy who’s been dominated by women his entire life.

Family unity, as I say, requires parents to maintain a United Front of authority with their children, and there are many unfortunate consequences of failing to do this. One of them is that, in a divided household, children don’t develop a proper sense of self-respect. Under wise parental authority — the United Front — children learn to live by the shared values of the parents, and to respect themselves according to how well they live up to those values. Children often go through a rebellious stage as adolescents, but once they reach maturity and get on the right track, upholding the values they learned growing up, the well-raised child will say, “I turned out all right, so I guess Mom and Dad must have known what they were doing all along.” The decadence of our society in the 21st century is simply a result of millions of bad parental decisions.

Well, I could extend this lecture a long way before exhausting every relevant point, but I’m nearing 1,500 words already, and I expect the readers will want to share their own insights. Bottom line, I reckon, is that we shouldn’t wonder why the suicide rate is now so high for men. Their souls are being crushed to despair by Team Woman.