Fathers

Albert Speer notes in his huge book of recollections about Hitler and Nazism that the German high command thought the Americans were no big deal when they entered the war on the other side.  A bunch of mongrels of impure race, unable to get along and accomplish anything, was the analysis.  D-day put an end to such talk.  Speer, as German Industrial Minister, watched the Americans simply swamp the Nazi industry by a factor of ten, in planes and tanks and just about every other weapon.  And far from being wimps, they challenged relentlessly, in the Battle of the Bulge, in the Operation Cobra breakout, in Sicily and in crossing the Rhine. 

            Men are supposed to grow up to be dangerous, take risks and be society’s providers. When Igor Sikorsky, inventor of the helicopter, made a bomb at age 8, and detonated it on the front porch blowing out all the windows of the house, his mother said, “Wait until your father comes home.”  Dad came home, laughed at his son’s audacity and suggested that in the future they build the bombs together—after they’d fixed windows.  My own dad used to announce the day we would work cattle as “time for a rodeo.”  And the time I wished out loud that I could climb that massive Sycamore tree, 100 feet, tallest in the timber, my grandfather told me to climb on the hay stacker and he would give me a 20 foot head start up the trunk.  Psychologist John Eldridge calls this quest for risk the Cowboy Stage of a man which typically peaks in the pre-adolescent but really continues throughout a lifetime. Dads encourage the cowboy risk. Moms usually just worry about the behavior. 

            Followed by the cowboy stage comes the warrior.  Warriors become accomplished in something.  They achieve.  They find their purpose.  When little Charlie Curtis ran for help when the Cheyennes were about to attack his own tribe of Kaws, he ran 65 miles in 19 hours and no one could figure out how such a small boy could do this.  His own tribal elders called him aside and questioned.  He attributed it to determination and divine intervention  to give him strength.  The elders, all of whom had done dream quests as young men, understood and were much impressed.  The kid had passed muster and went on to be Vice President of the United States.  The Kaw tribe took a second look at his Christian faith.  Being an accomplished warrior can only be awarded by a father or a group of men.  No woman can tell you how to be a real man. 

            Creation requires all of us to submit in humility to a purpose and order larger than ourselves.  That is the lesson of warriorhood.  You can be accomplished but you are never a god.  You need God as a guide and the rest of humanity as a team in order to survive.  And that is what those men of D-day had despite being just a couple years removed from the Grapes of Wrath.  The Nazis were wrong.  These Americans hung together.  Japanese pilots marveled that the Yanks had inferior planes but flew in such formations that they were unstoppable.  The Germans knew their equipment was better.  The Yanks had not been ready for the war. But their cowboys-turned-warriors were.

            And men know they need God as a moral compass.  Teens with no dad turn to peers, and a bunch of insecure boys make up the rules as they go along.  There is no real morality when this happens. But real men are noble and virtuous.  

            In all that we know about military history, it is not the technology or the the equipment or the spit and polish that makes the winner.  It is the espirit de corps, the discipline, teamwork and determination that constitute about 90% while technology matters 10%.  Charles Martel and the Franks were correctly thought to be dumb, ill-equipped barbarians by the Moors.  “They stood like a wall” against the Moorish cavalry at Tours because they had been trained to fight together and fought for their lives.  The same was true of American backwoods militia at Cowpens in the Revolutionary War.

            There is still a highly successful military in the United States.  There are still highly successful young men coming out of intact families.  But there is the growing minority of boys with no dad.  Nobody cheers their  tree-climbing or when they successfully tear down the chicken house.  Nobody salutes their stamina when they stuck their head out the iced-over cab of a truck to drive home 10 miles in -40 weather.  Nobody told them to go apologize for insulting an elderly lady.  And so those kids are gangstas, seeking peer approval when no Army, no dad gives it.  Peter Drucker told a nation who didn’t listen in 1970 that they would pay for the divorce culture with maladjusted and listless workers in the future.  And with little inner moral compass.

            That, Speer says, is what was at the core of Hitler’s monstrosity.  He was a boy fighting his Jewish origins, determined to prove himself a German man, but attempting it in frightening ways—wild oratory, radical socialism, and persecution of Jews and others who weren’t Germanic. Speer himself, more or less roped into the Nazi regime when they needed an industrial minister to supply the war, was always an outsider to the strange, depraved inner circle of Hitler.

 

           I guess that leaves me no great fan of the nanny state.  Men, according to feminazis are just inseminators.  But who will teach the kids to be honorable and brave?  Instead we get much higher probability for drop outs and druggies, rapists and unemployeds. Even a father like Huck Finn's humorously bad dad who cussed everything and everybody, seems better than none.