Gal-Queda: We Need Men… Who Build Stuff

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – ” ‘Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!’  Well, Camille, they’re not going to give credit where credit is due because they’re members of Gal-Qaeda.  They’re arrogant and full of themselves, just as so many other people have become, because we are we, and no one gives credit for anything.  Trust me, I know.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  For those of you that work with your hands, let me just share this with you.  It’s posted in today’s Pile of Prep.

[reading]

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, [Mike: By the bye, if you’re not up on your Latin, the thing longed for.] the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

But the triumphalism among some — like Hanna Rosin in her book, The End of Men, about women’s gains — seems startlingly premature. For instance, Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, [Mike: I call them members of Gal-Qaeda, by the bye.] who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

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Mike:  Well, Camille, they’re not going to give credit where credit is due because they’re members of Gal-Qaeda.  They’re arrogant and full of themselves, just as so many other people have become, because we are we, and no one gives credit for anything.  Trust me, I know.  Let me rephrase that because there are about 20 of you that do.  Few give credit for anything.  They just assume things just pop up where they’re supposed to.  They just assume that shows and books and cars and things to read the books on, all these other things, they just show up.  They don’t just show up.  People that pour their hearts and souls and lives and fortunes and sacred honor into these endeavors, the small business persons out there, the craftsmen, even the craftsladies, all of you, are probably not given your due.  Do you know why?

Because we live under a discarding ethos.  If you’re done using it, throw it away.  Why do you want to wash that dish for?  Buy the paper ones.  Why do you want to wash that fork for?  Buy the plastic ones.  Why do you want to do any of that kind of work for?  Just throw it away.  Get rid of it, get rid of it, get rid of it.  Why do you want to keep that old phone around for?  You can only talk on it.  You need to throw that one away and get one of these new ones.  Look at all the stuff you can do on that.  You mean do all this stuff while I’m not working?  While you’re playing the chase the candy game or whatever it is on your phone, you can’t possibly be working.  While you’re playing the latest edition of Temple Run while you’re supposed to be doing something in your glass-enclosed skyscraper, you can’t possibly be working.

I am always, always impressed by and more prone to respect and admire someone that actually does something with their hands and can do it and doesn’t complain about it.  You know what?  There are actually people who enjoy doing this stuff.  They like holding pieces of wood, imagine that, and carving them into things.  They like taking pieces of steel and heating them up and bending them and forming them into something.  Of course, the nonchalant, arrogant boob that is your average American today, when they go into a restaurant and sit in a chair that’s been handcrafted out of some metal that was just lying around, they just assume somebody made it.  No, somebody had to design that.  Somebody had to come up with the idea: Will it fall over if you sit in it?  How much weight can it hold?  If you lean back in it, will the legs break off?  Somebody had to put thought into this, but we just assume someone did it without ever giving a thought to: That is quite an achievement.

Instead, we spend our time bitching and whining and complaining and trying to run everyone else’s businesses and machine shops and manufacturing plants for them because no one runs it as well as the person on the outside who has absolutely zero invested in it but knows all the inner workings of your business.  Trust me, folks, I’ve heard, I’ve met, I’ve listened, and I bet you my case is not unique.  I bet you I just spoke for an awful lot of you people that experience the exact same thing.  It’s rare if you find someone who says: Man, I know a lot of work went into that.  That’s very cool.  Thank you.  Maybe it’s incumbent upon us, as we’re out there shopping and running about, doing this, that and the other this Christmas, maybe it’s incumbent upon us to find those people and things and where we do find them, to inquire: Who made this?

I told this story on air one day.  How many of you are bourbon drinkers?  When bourbon makes a big comeback, I think we’ll see the reemergence of the manly kind of man, the chivalrous man, the gentleman’s gentleman.  Bourbon is just kind of treading water right now.  High-class bourbons are emerging a bit, but that’s just because fancy people have lots of money.  Remember I told the story about how the label of Maker’s Mark bourbon came about?  It came about because Ms. Samuels, who loved her husband mightily — and her husband was the guy who wanted to make the world’s best Kentucky bourbon — came up with the idea for the label that’s still on the bottle.  The label that’s on the Maker’s Mark bottle today is the same one that was on it in 1958 when the first bottle was made.

The term “maker’s mark” is derived from or is the term of a craftsman.  The maker’s mark is what a craftsman puts on his work to show he made it.  I made that.  That’s my mark.  It used to be that when people took pride in making things, they would put their insignia, their maker’s mark on everything so that people would know John Doe made that.  It’s the same with Maker’s Mark.  If you look at the label on Maker’s Mark, there’s a star with an ‘S’ in it.  That’s the Samuel family mark they put on their bourbon.  When I’m drinking bourbon, I don’t mind paying the extra nine bucks a bottle that it probably costs on average for a bottle of Maker’s Mark.  I’ll drink the other ones, too, but I don’t mind paying the extra because I know the work that went into it.  I’ve actually met Rob Samuels, who is the grandson of the founder of Maker’s Mark.  That’s just one story, and I’m sure there are tens of thousands of those out there.

End Mike Church Show Transcript