The Extinction Of The American Male

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – We’ve all bemoaned the fact that there seem to be fewer and fewer young gentlemen out there.  We’ve all bemoaned the fact that the clowns that are in movies like Hangover are not the exception in our day and age, they’re the rule.  There are fewer and fewer young men that you see out there that you want to say: That’s a fine young man.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  We’ve all bemoaned the fact that there seem to be fewer and fewer young gentlemen out there.  We’ve all bemoaned the fact that the clowns that are in movies like Hangover are not the exception in our day and age, they’re the rule.  There are fewer and fewer young men that you see out there that you want to say: That’s a fine young man.  Not to say that there aren’t any, because there are, please do not misunderstand, but their numbers are dwindling.  This is a problem, folks.  Historically speaking, and I think biologically speaking, there needs to be strong men.

If you reverse the roles, what role is it that the single female is thrust into and must assume if there is not a strong male that is helping her raise the children?  What role must she assume?  She’s got to assume the strong male role.  There’s a problem with that.  You ought to be able to see this on the surface.  She’s not a male!  Isn’t that intriguing?  Isn’t that interesting?  [mocking] “All right, women, go out there and act like men.” — “Okay.  Wait a minute, we’re not men.” — “Don’t worry about it.  There’s no difference between the genders, none whatsoever.  The only differences is this stupid glass ceiling we need to take a sledgehammer to.  If we could just break that stupid glass ceiling, you just wait and see.  The sun will shine.  Streets will be paved with gold.  Everything will be equal.”  It’s not working out that way, is it?  It’s because we keep experimenting.  We keep engineering.  When will the engineering stop?

It is equally, I think, informative to ask the question: When, if ever, will the peoples of the West admit mistakes, admit defeat, admit failure?  We can’t even get political parties to admit that they were wrong when it comes to ill-advised, horrifically expensive and destructive wars.  That’s another part of this.  Many young men, too many young men, and those that may have been of the kind of quality of young gentleman that we’re talking about and that may find themselves in a military institution like Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, West Point or the Citadel, graduates of those schools, and even those that come out as officers, are being lost in America’s ill-advised and undeclared wars across the planet.  We know where some of the young men are going.  It’s just a tragic situation.

It is largely because people have lost a frontier to explore.  We don’t have the West to conquer anymore.  We don’t have foodborne illnesses to conquer.  We don’t have to worry about starving to death any longer.  We don’t have to worry about finding water to drink.  We don’t have to worry about shelter from the cold or air-conditioning from the heat or shelter from tornadoes and rains and snows and what have you.  We’ve conquered all the challenges that humanity has historically faced.  It took strong families, people congregating together to brave these challenges and to conquer them.  Here in the United States, not only did we conquer that, but we conquered all the other challenges.  We conquered the financial challenges.  We conquered social challenges.  We also conquered the frontier.  There is no exploration left.  There’s no great Wild West to go out there and settle.  There’s no Oregon Trail to go blaze.  There is no future Oregon Trail to go blaze.  This is the consequence and one of the side effects of this thing that some educated men call modernity.  I’m not going to talk about modernity because Brad Birzer has talked about this.  If I talk about anything that Birzer has ever talked about, then we will see the Birzer effect.  I’d like to read more about this.  As a matter of fact, I’d like to talk more about this.

Eric:  How much do you think it’s the absence of an actual male in the household?  Could it just be that single parents have less money because statistically single women have less money than families that have men and women?  There’s only one income.  Couldn’t that affect it because they don’t have enough money to send their kid to college or good schools?

Mike:  I suppose that probably does have an effect.

Eric:  Then can we say that we need a male in the household?

Mike:  I don’t know that that’s the principle effect.  If you really want to anger the gal-qaeda crowd, go pull a column written by Lew Rockwell sometime around 1999 or 2000.  He wrote something to the effect that: I can solve the unemployment problem today.  This was when unemployment — maybe it was in 2001 or 2002 when unemployment was eight percent or some mild-mannered number we’d just laugh at.  [mocking] “Eight percent?  Ha!  Let me tell you something.  I remember when it was 14 percent and I had to walk uphill, four miles, in the snow, with no shoes to go look for a job.  You don’t know how easy you have it.”  Lew wrote that if we could just tell all the women to go home, all the women that are in professional positions to just go home, unemployment problem solved.  Every male that wants a job will have one.

The financial part, of course it does.  If you think about conquering the Wild West, conquering the Atlantic seaboard, it was families that did this.  Everyone had to pitch in.  Everyone, even the children, had a role.  The family was the central unit.  The family in Western civilization is and has been the central unit.  Today, it’s pilloried.  Popular culture says that families are weird.  Popular culture says that two-parent, nuclear families are weird, an aberration.  We don’t even have the term bastard — I’ve talked about this before on the show.  I remember melting the phone lines with this subject before.  We don’t even have the term bastard in our vocabulary.  Have you ever called anyone a bastard, Eric?  Outside of calling them fat bastard from the Austin Powers movie, have you ever called anyone a bastard?  Do you even know what a bastard is?

Eric:  I hadn’t until I started answering phone calls for this show.

Mike:  [laughing] I’ve been called a bastard.

Eric:  No, I haven’t used that word in a while.  I think that word is probably dying out.

Mike:  Dying out?  That word is dead, es mortis, gone, bury it.

Eric:  Are we evolving to become more like other mammals where we don’t raise our kids?  We’ll be like sharks and just let our kids on their way and they can figure out their own thing.

Mike:  And you’ll only need one bull shark for 20 females.  You only need one bull for 20 cows.  Isn’t that intriguing?  That’s a great point, Eric.  Have you ever seen the John Hurt movie The Elephant Man?

Eric:  Not in a while.

Mike:  You have seen it, though?

Eric:  Yes.

Mike:  There’s a scene in there where I can’t remember who’s taunting or teasing him and stoning him and beating him up.  [mocking] “You’re a freak.  You’re a freak.” — “I am not an animal!  I am a man!”  It’s a pretty poignant scene.  That’s a very good analogy.  We’re not becoming more humanized, more westernized, more Christian.  We’re not becoming more familial.  We’re becoming less familial just like animals.  Young Eric with the line of the day.  Hey, man, pat yourself on the back.  That is exactly right.

Eric:  I have Darrel coming behind here to give me a pat on the back.

Mike:  Darrel, go on the other side of the counter and pat Eric on the back.  As a matter of fact, pat him on the head and give him an apple.  This is a great find here.  We are becoming animals and animal-like.  You know what?  You should write a research paper on this.  I’m too busy doing charity cook-offs this weekend.  You should write a research paper on this.  Have it on my desk for Tuesday morning, young man.

Eric:  I’ll try to squeeze it in.

End Mike Church Show Transcript