Mammals & Pappals

There are thousands of mammal species on this planet, but only one pappal: Homo sapiens. 

"Mammal," of course, is etymologically related to yo' mama. Unlike reptiles or insects, yo' mama don't just lay eggs, wish them luck, and skedaddle. Rather, mammals are characterized by an extrauterine relationship of varying lengths between mother and child.  

Here's a dictionary definition: a mammal is

a warm-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that is distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of the young, and (typically) the birth of live young.

Thus we see that Pete Buttigieg, for example, is excluded from this definition as a result of being an invertebrate.

Here's my problem, and it's not your problem, but here it is anyway: I've already seen this post in its entirety. It was a "vision," so to speak, and it was accompanied by the usual metacosmic certitude. 

Therefore, all that remains for me is to sketch it out. The sketching isn't for my benefit; again, I've already seen the end of this movie, so it's not as if I need to convince myself of its intrinsic truth.

So, is it for your benefit? No, I would never go that far. I just put it out there, mainly to keep the mind limber and the trolls piqued. 

Come to think of it, that's the same reason why I leave comments on this or that blog. The comments are always in the form of a joke or gag or aphorism, because these forms force the mind to create a little something out of nothing. An unexpected guffah-HA out of nowhere. More generally, any post that fails to provoke at least one guffah-HA is a failed post.

It's a spiritual exercise, really. A man who is tired of ridiculing the left is tired of life. 

But a man of the left isn't even a man, and of course I mean this literally, certainly not as an insult. There are degrees, of course, but I will repeat that a full blown man of the left -- from Stalin to Hitler to Mao -- is missing something vital, and we call this thing real manhood. 

To turn it around, who among us would call Castro a proper man except the improper men -- the genderless freaks -- of the left?

I apologize for the crack about being "genderless." For just as often it is not a matter of being genderless but of having too many genders, of being genderful.

Back to my problem. Although the end is certain, there are any number of pathways to get there, and writing a post means hacking a pathway through the jungle, or maybe finding one's way across a featureless desert. Where to begin?

I know: I'll begin at the end, with what triggered the vision to begin with. It was while reading an essay by the brilliant Rob Henderson about his own fatherless -- to say the least -- childhood. Calling him fatherless is like calling mentally ill and drug addicted street people "homeless" -- as if a home is the only thing lacking in their lives.

Except it's sort of the opposite of that: for what if Henderson, in spite of all the challenges, had had a strong, stable, and virtuous father protecting him the whole time? 

Let me begin with a couple of extracts, starting with a dramatic hook:

My earliest memory is of me gripping my mother, in the dark, burying my face so deeply into her stomach I can’t breathe. It’s dark. I come up for air and see two police officers looming over us. They want to take her away. I’m scared. I don’t want to let her go. I fasten myself to her as hard as I can. Suddenly, I’m in a long white hallway. I’m sitting on a bench next to my mother drinking chocolate milk. My three-year-old legs dangle above the floor. I sneeze and spill my milk. I look to my mom for help, but she can’t move her arms. She’s wearing handcuffs. I start to cry.

That year, I entered the Los Angeles County foster care system. I never saw my mother again (Link: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-lost-boys-and-me).

Not an auspicious start for a pappalian mammal.

From the time I was born until I was 17 years old, nearly everything in my life was propelling me to a life as one of America’s lost boys -- the young men who fail to mature, do poorly in school, live on the economic margins, and become absentee fathers or fail to form stable families of their own. 

Who fail to become men, precisely. Obviously we're not talking about mere biological manhood, which can only be prevented by transgenderist quacks armed with puberty blockers and parricidal hormones. 

Henderson goes on to highlight the fact that

one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s. Meantime, over the past half-century, the number of men behind bars has more than quadrupled.

These are but symptoms of something more essential that is missing: manhood. 

As an asnide, we've all heard the jokes about Mayor Pete taking two months off of his do-nothing job for "paternity leave," meaning that he is fundamentally confused -- big surprise! -- as to what paternity is. For a real man doesn't take the occasion of the birth of his child to slack off, except maybe for a few days.

Rather, this is precisely when a real man begins to double-down on his career, in order to be able to provide the resources necessary for his wife and child to thrive. Paternity leave is not a thing, except when a man leaves work at the end of the day to spend time with the family. Maternity leave, however, is a thing. A 24/7 x 18+ years-or-so thing. A quintessentially human mammal thing.

To say that mothers have very different roles and functions from fathers has become "controversial." But even feminists know they can't sprout a johnson, therefore the need for these bitter nihilists to castrate men for the sake of equity. 

Henderson is presently in graduate school at Cambridge, where he is studying social psychology. I, of course, used to be a psychologist, but have in the meantime been kicked upstairs to full-time cosmic pneumatologist. Thus, we will be examining this subject from the standpoint of the perennial philosophy, psychology, and religion, not from the perspective of mere academic psychology, much less the "culture war" between civilization and barbarism (although the latter is an effect of what we'll be discussing).