Reclaiming Manhood with the Iron Giant and Mr. Darcy

“What is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.

When I was in college I decided to start a faith-based discussion group for men, about well, being a man. For some strange reason, I felt that it had to be very early in the morning, because getting up early was manly. In my campus-wide emails I also resorted to tasteless jokes about going out to chop down trees and break rocks with heads. Whatever this says about my social development is less relevant than the question that I was attempting to answer, however foolishly, with that group and those jokes: What does it mean to be a man?

This is a question that has tortured me since my adolescence, and tortures me still. Whether this essay will provide any relief remains to be seen. My small group, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, even with my Christian friends. Not many undergraduate guys were willing to get up for a discussion group that started at 6:30am on Friday mornings; or if they were willing, the flesh was weak. This does not mean that the group was a failure, because I had one regular attendee who I was able to talk quite deeply with, and I still think about him today. I was also told by a few people that they would have attended if it was at a less inconvenient time. This showed me that I was not the only one tortured by the question.

So, what does it mean to be a man? We will find out together, dear reader, whether I am any better equipped to answer this question than I was over a decade ago. But first I must define exactly what is meant by it. We could try to answer it by taking a survey of the men in our lives, and saying, “These examples show what it is to be a man.” But despite confounding us with wildly different conclusions, this method also reveals to us our bias. I think that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, have already taken a survey of the men in our lives, and the results have made us uneasy. That the question occurs to us reveals an insecurity about manhood that cannot be assuaged by the simple truth that no men are perfect. We would not be asking if there wasn't something resembling a real crisis. What I believe we really mean to ask is, “What does it mean to be a good man?”

In order to save myself and my readers a great deal of confusion and time, I will confine myself to defining “good manhood” in the context of two relationships that a man forms in his life. The first is a man's relationship to society, and the second is a man's relationship to women. I must also point out that my perspective as a straight, white, Christian man shapes this conversation, because in these great gray social topics, it is only our own examined experience that counts, as flawed and subjective as it is. If you would like to discount the application of the following words because of that, go right ahead, this is just one man's attempt to deconstruct and redeem his gender, and keep it interesting.

I must also note that these two relationships leave a great deal of territory open and unexplored. This openness of the question is partly why it is so torturous. The feeling a man gets, when he surveys his life and the lives of the men around him, is that we have all been pushed out into a roiling sea with no map. If we have been given compasses, they all point in different directions, because postmodern society, in destroying (perhaps rightly) the traditional framework of manhood, has not troubled itself to supply a replacement. If we take data about social outcomes and measures of happiness as a compass, we may end up 'better' in life, but we will have no way to describe why it is, in fact, 'better' to be socially and economically stable and happy about it. And we must be very careful to know what we mean when we talk about social and economic success. Is that stable job with a good income, in fact, ethical? Is the stability it provides in allowing you to give a comfortable life to your family worth more than the lives that the corporation or company you work for may or may not be destroying? If you do have an ethical job, are you hacking at the leaves of evil or the root of it? Does it pay well? Are you sacrificing your own well-being and time with your family to be a justice hero? Why are teachers paid less than lawyers? Are you involved in the lives of your kids? Is that involvement positive or negative? What about your wife or partner? Do you still cherish and value them? Do they love you? When was the last time you looked at porn? How wrong did it feel? Even if you have never looked, when was the last time you fantasized about another partner? If you are not the breadwinner, do you do your share of chores? If you do, does your partner have to remind you to do them? Do you do them well? Could you sleep easy at night if you were not the breadwinner? If you are a bachelor, do you clean your room? Can you cook? Do you care? When was the last time you volunteered for charity? Why is that relevant? Does anyone take me seriously? What makes life worth living? Do you feel lost yet?

This spiral of rhetorical questions is an example of the spiraling questions that torture me as a result of the first question. It feels almost impossible to say anything definitive, because any of the positive statements I might derive from the men that I admire—”Real men are patient.” “Real men are humble.” “Real men restrain their violence.” “Real men use their strength for the good of others.” “Real men sacrifice themselves for others.“—can also be applied to women. Is there anything gendered about patience and humility and strength and sacrifice? Indeed, if we take an honest look at the roles women have been forced to play throughout history, a patient and honest man should be somewhat overawed by the patience and humility and strength and sacrificial love of women. And even if we admit that men are, in general, physically stronger than women; how does that help us? Please do not misunderstand me. I believe that there are key differences between men and women, but I do not believe they are as easily defined as I once did. I do, in fact, do chores differently than my wife. One can tell the difference between how I fold laundry and how she folds laundry. But those differences are irrelevant. What is relevant is that so far from men and women changing, it is our society that is constantly shifting and changing around us, so that we must define ourselves in the face of the claims it makes. Society is the “atmosphere” of which Virginia Woolf speaks in Three Guineas:

“Odour then—or shall we call it 'atmosphere'?—is a very important element in professional life; in spite of the fact that like other important elements it is impalpable. It can escape the noses of examiners in examination rooms, yet penetrate boards and divisions and affect the senses of those within [...] It is true that women civil servants deserve to paid as much as men; but it is also true that they are not paid as much as men. The discrepancy is due to atmosphere” (Woolf 95).

For Virginia Woolf in 1938, atmosphere was denoted by the resistance that women faced when trying to enter the the professional spheres from which they had traditionally been denied access. As a straight white man in 2026, I cannot fully understand that atmosphere, but I will be bold enough to say that the bewilderment I tried to illustrate with so many rhetorical questions is how I perceive the atmosphere that men live in now. It is perhaps not as potentially damaging to the mind and body as the atmosphere that people of other genders live in, but that is not for me to say, and I do not think a competition about who has it worse would be productive. All metaphors have limits. We would do well to keep those limits in mind as we move from this long, confused preamble, to the body of the essay.

Man Vs. Violence: The Iron Giant

The Iron Giant is a 1999 animated film about a robot who crash lands off the coast of Maine during the Cold War. The Giant suffers damage to the head, and is diverted from its original purpose of destruction. The principal human character, a boy named Hogarth, discovers the Giant near his house and befriends him, but the military comes to investigate the crash landing, and Hogarth finds himself trying to hide the giant.

We are given two men (other than the Giant and the general) to compare in this movie. Dean, a beatnik junkyard sculpture artist; and Kent Mansley, the government agent investigating the crash. Hogarth's father died before the start of the movie, so it can be said that he is searching for a father figure. He is also living in an atmosphere of fear. The students are 'educated' in class with a film that superimposes a mushroom cloud over a peaceful town. “Suddenly,” the narrator says. “Without warning, ATOMIC HOLOCAUST.” From Kent, the rude, take-charge, slugger/bucko/chief/champ, we are shown the 'manly' response to fear of the Unknown Other. He says, “Who built it? The Russians? The Chinese? Martians? Canadians?! I DON'T CARE! All I know is we didn't build it, and that's reason enough to assume the worst and blow it to kingdom come!” This quote reveals that Mansley's fear, masquerading as bravado (he steals cars and ogles women and threatens to separate Hogarth from his mother in the name of national security), is based on the fear of losing power. This is the familiar demon that drives competition among men and the basis of that buzz-phrase, 'toxic masculinity.' Whether based on the violence of our ancient past or not, I have observed that, in general, boys are groomed to train in violence. And if not violence, some skill or specialization that can be used to gain or defend power. This, I believe, is why so many video games (most of which, in the early days, were made by men), involve fighting and big boobs. Why were atomic bombs built? To defend power. What justifies cruelty in conquest and racist policies? The defense of power. Viewed from this perspective, it is no surprise to me that white men have been the main perpetrators of the toxic male defense of power, because they have been the principal beneficiaries of that power. This is what I believe is driving the cruelty of Trump's politics, as well as the complicity that allowed him to get where he is.

James Baldwin once pointed out that the majority is not the group that is most numerous, it is the group that has the most influence [^1]. In other words, white men are afraid because our influence is eroding, and our cruel and cowardly politicians are desperately trying to hold onto it. When I watched this movie with my wife, she commented that Kent Mansley is a little unbelievable. After all, he disobeys direct orders after the general realizes that the Iron Giant only reacts to violence, and orders a nuclear strike on his own location. But having observed men throughout my life, and having observed the self-destructive impulses in myself, I can easily (sadly) imagine a Mansley. “I can do anything I want, whenever I want,” says Kent. This is the unspoken belief that drives the actions of even the most gentle of men. The fear of losing the license to do whatever a man wants is what leads to complicit passivity and self destruction. It is only by confronting and defeating this fear, over and over, that a man can walk the path to true manhood.

I must also take time to point out that so many of the movies and video games and books that we imagine to be found in man caves are full of heroes who are defined by their ability to commit violence. Heroes like John Wayne, John Wick, John McClane, John 117 and all the other non-Johns that are really various incarnations of Odysseus would not be in our media if they didn't have some violence to commit. The noblest of them use their violence to protect the innocent, and there is certainly nobility in putting oneself in harm's way, but it bears pointing out that it would not be necessary for them to do so if men were not so violent in the first place. Haley Bennet's character in Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent Seven would not have to say “These men are here to help us,” if there were not already hundreds of men there to kill and rape them. I like watching Denzel Washington dish out justice as much as the next guy, but we must not lose sight of why that dishing out of justice feels so cathartic, and where it might lead us. In fact we can see where it has gotten us. The cowards who find their way to power spend trillions of our tax money on instruments of murder and death that they can drop on people from three thousand miles away. They are not putting their lives on the line when they can buy a Rolex and pretend to be James Bond. And so far from having a just cause like Sam Chisolm's, their cause has mostly been money. Perhaps, because I cannot muster enough empathy to understand their actions, the root cause of it is a Mansley-like terror that the great stolen horde they are sitting on could one day be stolen back, and they are willing to do anything to keep it all to themselves. What a pathetic way to spend one's life. What a pathetic failure of manhood, which ought to be marked by a willingness to sacrifice power for the beloved community.

The other man we are given to examine is Dean. He owns the town junkyard, is something of an artist, listens to jazz, drinks espresso, stays up late, has a cool bathrobe, lets Hogarth and the Iron Giant hide out at his place. He's cool, man. Dean is a counterpoint to Mansley, and as a white man on the lower echelons of privilege, he is able to show a better reaction to the threat of violence and the loss of power. When Hogarth spills his insecurities after drinking Dean's espresso, Dean responds with decent advice, “Who cares what those creeps think, you know? They don't decide who you are, you do. You are who you choose to be.” This advice is more relevant to the Iron Giant's journey, but it also reveals the all-important fault in the Mansley way of life, which is that a man does have a choice. As Steinbeck so gloriously represented in East of Eden, “Thou mayest” is the antidote to sick fear and cowardice. Yes, confronting the fear of losing power means confronting the fear of death, but we must all face death whether we want to or not. “Ultimately,” wrote Martin Luther King, “One's sense of manhood must come from within him.”[^2]. But Dean is not the most heroic representation of this confrontation because he is not the hero of this movie, the Iron Giant is.

When we first meet the Iron Giant he is devouring a power line near Hogarth's home. Hogarth is home alone because his mom has to work late, and hearing the noise, the boy picks up his BB Gun and goes to investigate the noise. The Giant gets tangled in the lines and seems to be in pain. Hogarth starts to run away but decides to help him by flipping a lever to turn off the power station. In the scuffle, Hogarth drops his gun and the Giant stomps on it before passing out and waking up. This crushing of the gun is symbolic for the Iron Giant, because the Iron Giant, quite literally, was supposed to be a gun. He comes from an alien planet and later in the movie he decimates the US forces with futuristic weaponry. But because he was damaged, and because of his relationship with Hogarth, the Iron Giant realizes that he can choose who he wants to be. Perhaps the most affecting scene that explicitly confronts violence is the scene in which Hogarth and the Iron Giant meet a deer in the woods. The Giant is moved by the deer's beauty, but a few moments later we hear a gunshot, and the deer is dead. Two hunters come and are terrified by the Iron Giant. One of them drops his gun as he runs away. Hogarth explains that the deer is dead, that he was killed by a gun. Later that night Hogarth and the Giant have a heart to heart about death:

HOGARTH: I know you feel bad about the deer. But it's not your fault. Things die. It's part of life. It's bad to kill. But it's not bad to die.
IRON GIANT: You die?
HOGARTH: Well... yes, someday.
IRON GIANT: I die?
HOGARTH: I don't know. You're made of metal...but you have feelings. And you think about things. And that means you have a soul. And souls don't die.
IRON GIANT: Soul?
HOGARTH: Mom says it's something inside of all good things... and that it goes on forever and ever.

It is the Iron Giant who is confronted with the choice between violence or death. His programming tells him to destroy, and he is ultimately the strongest 'man' in the world of the movie. He could, if he chose, completely conquer the world. But Hogarth convinces him to reject his violence. The climax of the movie then builds, as Mansley disobeys orders and tells the ship to launch the nuke, and the Iron Giant chooses to collide with it in the air in order to save the town.

Shortly before this climax, Hogarth and the Iron Giant are playing in the junkyard. Hogarth is pretending that the Iron Giant is Atomo (a robot sent to destroy earth). Hogarth uses a toy gun and it activates the Giant's weapons, and he fires a laser. Dean saves Hogarth and yells at the Iron Giant, calling him a “big gun.” The Giant tries to refuse, but he is scared of hurting Hogarth and runs away. We cut to two boys on a roof on the lookout for the giant metal man. The railing breaks and they fall. The Iron Giant makes a diving catch to save them in the middle of town. When Hogarth and Dean find him, the Giant smiles and says, “I am not a gun.”

I cannot tell you exactly why this line stuck in my mind for so long after watching the Iron Giant for the first time as an adult, but I think I can now. As I envision what happens immediately after the Iron Giant says this (he is shot in the back by a tank), I feel as though I am watching a vision of what it feels like to be a man with good intentions. The world, as much as we would wish it were not so, does not exist to validate our dreams and best hopes. The world of men is mostly indifferent and randomly hostile. Moved by my better angels, I have made declarations of intent, only to be shot in the back and induced to reach for my weapons (for me, some plan to be profitable and the comfort of video games or worse). This is the same note that resonates with me when I watch Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, in which a guitar player (a mariachi) is induced to pick up a guitar case full of weapons instead of his instrument. Goodness and beauty do not simply come about, they are fought and sacrificed for. They are missed by fateful decisions which rely on safety and the lie that the highest good we can do for our families is make them comfortable and happy. They are sacrificed for in the middle of the night, in the most mundane ways, by giving up what you and the world once thought was glorious. Normal guys like me don't get to go out by blowing up a nuke (I hope?), and one of the hardest struggles I have faced (embarrassingly), is admitting just how much I want the glory of doing something as impressive and heroic and easy to praise—and giving that up for goods that are far greater than glory.

We are off the rails now, blown apart in the pieces of my life experience, much like the Iron Giant at the end of the movie. But now, let's try to bring those pieces back together. It is time to turn to Jane Austen and Mr. Darcy.

Man Vs. Woman: Mr. Darcy

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Ch 27.

If we are confused by a man's relationship to society, there would seem to be little hope that we can find ourselves in his relationship to woman. What topic has been written about, dreamed about, sung about, lied about, more? But enough excuses. Why, of all people, are we turning to Jane Austen? Perhaps it is because outsiders are sometimes the most suited to bring insight to a muddy relationship. Perhaps because Mr. Darcy is famous. He, by the most warped of all consensuses (memes), is an ideal man. Why? It is because Mr. Darcy, when confronted with evidence of his pride, takes proactive steps to fix himself and his harmful actions.

When we first meet Mr. Darcy there is no doubt of his pride. He snubs Elizabeth at a ball and passes the evening rather grumpily (Ch 3). Darcy is described as “haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not inviting” (Ch 4). Through a series of misunderstandings, Elizabeth comes to despise Mr. Darcy almost as much as if he were her worst enemy. She hears and readily believes rumors that he disowned his innocent god-brother, she is disgusted by his cold and haughty manner in their social interactions, and she is utterly shocked when he proposes to her. It is important to note that Elizabeth's family, though not poor, is in need of a male heir because the father's estate is entailed. His five daughters, none of whom are allowed to inherit the estate, will be destitute if he dies without a male heir, and he and his wife are now too old to consider trying again. Since Mr. Darcy is exceedingly rich, many a woman in Elizabeth's position might have sacrificed her happiness for her family. But she is our heroine, and she is also somewhat prejudiced:

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense” (Ch 24).

She refuses him outright. Indeed, even a woman prepared to sacrifice her happiness would be put off by the way Darcy presents his proposal. “His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgement had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.” It is in spite of his better judgement that he proposes; in separating the kind (and also rich) Mr. Bingley from Elizabeth's sister, he “has been kinder to his friend than himself”; he asks (not unjustly, for Elizabeth's mother and younger sisters are quite ridiculous) if he should be expected to rejoice in the hope of relations “so decidedly beneath” his own.

There are not many readers who do not sympathize with Elizabeth when she refuses Darcy, but when we learn from Darcy's letter the truth about his god-brother (a prodigal who tries to seduce Darcy's teenage sister for the fortune), things get more complicated. Add to this the fact that Darcy's behavior is not so rude as it seems to our culture. Darcy, like Elizabeth, is surrounded by rather ridiculous and haughty acquaintances (except for Mr. Bingley). And his grumpiness might be caused by a perception of just how preposterous British aristocratic society was. As a very rich man, he would probably have been treated with a great deal of flattery and sycophantic adoration (typified by the attentions of Ms. Bingley). His attraction to Elizabeth seems to be based on her willingness to converse with him honestly and intellectually (and her “fine eyes”). I say seems because Austen, like Shakespeare, leaves a great deal of interpretation up to the reader. To me, it seems that Elizabeth engages him on subjects that he has never been able to talk about with anyone else (Ch 11). This kind of intimacy is “dangerous” because it is the type of intimacy on which true connubial felicity is founded. But at the time of his proposal he is still too proud not to assume that Elizabeth would be happy to say yes. Her refusal exposes himself, to himself. And he is probably saying, at the same time Elizabeth is saying, “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (Ch 36).

The self knowledge that intimacy with another can prompt is one of the greatest benefits of marriage. It is also one of the greatest destroyers of marriage, for if either partner is not prepared to change and admit their own faults, they will drift away because the other partner will be a reminder of that fault that they wish to run from. What makes Darcy remarkable as a male literary figure is that he allows this encounter to change him. When Elizabeth meets him later by chance, on a trip with her aunt and uncle, his manners are remarkably warm. He is friendly and deferential to people “decidedly beneath” his own station. He invites her uncle to fish, and leaves Elizabeth (who also allows intimacy to change her) somewhat astonished. “It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should love me” (Ch 43). Then comes the climax, in which Elizabeth's flirty younger sister elopes with Darcy's awful god-brother, and Darcy saves her by a significant sacrifice, a sacrifice which he wishes to remain secret and for which he expects nothing from Elizabeth.

Mr. Darcy is legendary because he shows very simply just what love for a woman can mean for a man:

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit... Such I was, from eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased” (Ch 58).

So far from being an unrealistic ideal (except for the money), he is a picture of how men really ought to act (accounting for differences of culture and personality) towards a woman. While it is true that two partners in a healthy relationship ought to give, it is very important that love be given without expectation or record keeping. Elizabeth, indeed, is also changed and allows her love to forgive and honor Darcy without compromising her ideals. This is, I think, really what that most misquoted of Apostles meant when he wrote “submit to one another,”[^3] for 'submission,' perhaps not the best translation of the Greek word, is one of the highest forms of love. Just as two partners in a dance must yield even as they propel and support each other, so must lovers.

Man Vs. Himself: Sacrifice and Active Love

“I can give her everything, but not my male independence.”[^4]

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

Where does this leave us? What conclusions can we draw? What does it mean to be a good man? The only theme I can draw from our survey of The Iron Giant and Pride and Prejudice is the theme of sacrifice. The Iron Giant sacrifices himself and his violent purpose to save Hogarth and the town, and Mr. Darcy sacrifices his pride to properly love Elizabeth. This is an ancient theme, that might not bear repeating if it were not so necessary to repeat. We have come a long way, and part of the crisis of manhood that we can all smell is, I think, the subconscious terror that men feel when they sense that the foundations of society that once upheld their Power and their Pride are crumbling. Perhaps now that there is less power and pride to give up (though we still have a long way to go), it is the concept of manhood itself that must be sacrificed.

When I was in high school, I was a big fan of the original NCIS with Mark Harmon's Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Gibbs, though not exactly macho, is nonetheless something of a man's man. He catches criminals, works on boats in his basement, and only drinks black coffee. There was something about the image of him that I wanted to emulate, so when I started drinking coffee I drank it black. Did I like it? Quite honestly, not really, but I stuck with it and still drink it black today. This is the power of 'atmosphere,' it quite literally changed my taste buds. How much more powerful can it be, then, when we consider issues more important than taste. What can this atmosphere do to how a man treats women, where he goes to work, who he seeks friendships with, and what he values? Atmosphere, in shaping these things, has the power to shape almost the entire course of a man's life. But only if we let it.

When I say that the concept of manhood must be sacrificed, I do not mean that all concept of gender ought to be thrown out. There are physiological differences that we ignore at our own peril, but these differences have nothing to do with what we wear or where we work or how much we can bench press or who cooks dinner or who does the laundry or what sort of movies we watch. So much of what has been spoken of as 'manhood' throughout my entire life has been entirely cultural. When I say that the concept of manhood must be sacrificed, I mean that a man ought to do things simply because they are the right thing to do and not because they validate a meaningless social vanity.[^5] This means that I ought to care for my family as best as I am able because I love them and it is my duty as a parent. This means that I should place the needs of my wife's body over the needs of my own. This means that not being the primary breadwinner should not be a source of shame. I have struggled for years with my self esteem as a stay at home parent because I did not realize how much I wanted a career until I didn't have one. All I can say is that because the culture I move in accepts Moms into the role of homemaker more readily, I have found myself between worlds, and I would be lying if I said I did not have to face my envy and strangle it far more frequently than I would wish. Every friend and acquaintance I have talked to concludes that being a stay at home Dad is really noble and practical for our situation, and indeed this is a conclusion I have come to over and over, but knowledge and true belief are two different things. Knowing that the air is bad does not help you breathe in it. This is why I say the concept of manhood has to be sacrificed. This does not mean trading in your truck for a minivan, but asking yourself, every time you must move in the atmosphere of culture, why am I doing this? Do I really want this thing? Do I really enjoy this activity? Is my sense of self worth coming from outside of me, or from within?

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf points out the ridiculous outfits and baubles that the military (and then a strictly male) world uses to distinguish itself: “Your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers.” She also does not fail to include the academic world, with its robes and wigs and titles, and illustrates the vanity of men by providing a counterexample: “A woman who advertised her motherhood by a tuft of horsehair on the left shoulder would scarcely, you will agree, be a venerable object.” She then concludes that the best way for women entering professional life to discourage war (a major topic of her essay), is to “refuse all such distinctions and all such uniforms for ourselves.” In a similar way, I believe that the path to true manhood is the refusal of meaningless distinctions and uniforms. Whether they be video game skins, medals, watches, clothes, trucks, social media statuses, likes, competitions, hobbies, Strava times, podcast views, church leadership positions, or Magic decks. In short, any thing, even any good thing, that a man can use to give them self the appearance of good needs to be examined and held with an open palm.

The second, and perhaps more practical application, is the importance of rejecting passivity. The Iron Giant restrains his violence, but he chooses to expose himself in order to save the kids and the town. Mr. Darcy, rather than letting things run their course, actively fixes his mistakes with a prompt from anywhere but his own conscience. I believe that cowardly passivity has been the cause of more evil than any other sin. Where was Adam when Eve was with the snake? Structures of oppression have been allowed to persist because millions of men have silently watched and gone with the flow. Only when the current deposits them in a stagnant pool, and they realize that their cowardice might be exposed, does the bottomless terror grip their stomachs and propel them to desperate cruelty. To be a man is to sacrifice vain desires and to love actively. As a father, I believe it is my duty to seek out my kids, engage them, and teach them the values that are important to know before they ask. This is to be done with love, gentleness, and full respect for their humanity and agency. If they do not have the skills or the moral fortitude to engage with the world by the time they graduate high school, I bear a great deal of the blame. To be a man is to prevent disasters before they happen, and not expect a medal for it. In my role as a husband, I am to seek out my wife not for comfort or validation, but to love and honor and woo her as a woman “worthy of being pleased.” As a citizen, it is my duty to engage with society and act for its benefit instead of trying to squeeze everything I can from it. These concepts of sacrifice and active love can be applied to friendships and family. Indeed they must be applied by the man to his own life, because no one else can do it for him. It is, tragically, much easier written than done, requiring constant humility and grace. For me, this involves a great deal of prayer and grit, in order to pick myself up and keep trying when I fail over and over and over. But it must be done if a man is to reclaim a sense of manhood that comes from within, and by living and breathing out that sense of self, change the atmosphere that has stifled all genders for so long.

Footnotes

[1] “Now, what I have been trying to suggest in all this is that the only useful definition of the word “majority” does not refer to numbers , and it does not refer to power. It refers to influence.” You will notice that I use influence and power somewhat synonymously. I believe Baldwin was trying to make the distinction that whoever is “in power” (elected or un-elected officials) is not necessarily the one with the influence. For the scope of my essay, I think that my point has been made. Majority does not have to do with numbers or even representation, but with who can influence the decisions of those in power.

[2] “I think the aura of paramilitarism among the black militant groups speaks much more of fear than it does of confidence. I know, in my own experience, that I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that, as a teacher of philosophy of nonviolence, I couldn't keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death and I dealt with it. And from that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Ultimately, one's sense of manhood must come from within him.“

[3] Ephesians 5:21: “...submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.“

[4] This line is thought by Vronsky, the man that Anna leaves her husband for, when Anna is starting to become jealous. Vronsky is unable to give up his “male independence” to be a truly devoted partner.

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#essay #JaneAusten #TheIronGiant #VirginiaWoolf #JamesBaldwin

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Bibliography

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act II, Scene 2.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Hogarth Press, Mecklenburgh Square, London, 1943. Accessed on Internet Archive.

The Iron Giant. Directed by Brad Bird, Warner Bros. Feature Animation, 1999.

Baldwin, James. “In Search of a Majority: An Address.” Nobody Knows My Name. Collected Essays. Library of America, New York, NY, 1998.

The Magnificent Seven. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 2016.

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. Penguin Group, New York, NY, 2002.

King, Martin Luther Jr. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. “A Testament of Hope.” Harper Collins, 1986. Page 323.

El Mariachi. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Los Hooligans Productions, 1993.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Arcturus Publishing Limited, London, 2011.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Part Six, Chapter 25. Penguin Group. New York, NY. 2000.

NCIS. Created by Donald P. Bellisario and Don McGill. Bellisarius Productions, CBS Studios, 2003-present.

time heals the old wounds / only if you allow light / into your dark heart

Finished reading Greenblatt's THE SWERVE. It's good, but not as good as it started out. The first half is quite quite superb, but the second half is far less interesting. Many good historical tidbits in there, but it does suffer from a terribly myopic view of history and scientific development while pretending to possess a grand scope of things. Not so much actually. Still worth the read.

Couple days left in Houston before my return to Cairo. Snatched SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE from my storage unit to reread on the flight (a full decade since I read it), and am abhorred by the sheer quantity of my possessions. Too much of it is stuff I just can't let go of, but I think I can probably—with some effort—do away with half (after having already done away with a lot).

Last day with my kid, “the plan is to do nothing but look at Pokemon cards and eat ice-cream and watch three toons” according to him. Obviously, that's not how things will go down, but it'll wholesome and sweet nonetheless as the world outside grows more insane and stupid and inhumane.

#journal #reads

here I am again / repeating emotions fill / my heart with despair

— Tu ne dors pas ?

— Non. Tu n’arrives pas non plus ?

— Non, ça doit être la lune.

On a commencé à parler, à la lueur de cette jolie lune, à la table de la cuisine.

Moi, c’était pas la lune. Je lui ai déballé, toutes les petites piques, toutes les exclusions, les humiliations. C’était comme au collège avant que j’en change pour être avec ma copine. Cette même copine avec qui on était ensemble ces vacances-ci. Mais pas dans la même équipe. Harcelée par son équipe à elle, par une cheffe d’équipe qui m’aimait bien. Elle et ma cheffe, juste devant moi, ont rigolé qu’elles auraient bien voulu nous échanger.

Me faire hurler dans les oreilles par la coconne de l’équipe. Dire à une fille qu’on lui a parlé derrière son dos (jamais faire ça, jamais) et elle revient avec l’hypocrite en question qui dit que je mens. Les filles qui viennent me demander des comptes parce que sur mon pyjama il y a une étiquette (10 ? 12 ?) ans alors que j’en ai 13.

Les cheffes, adultes, qui ne calculent rien. Chaque jour un petit laïus inspiré de la Bible et des règles des Guides de France, en mode ravi de la crèche aimévoulézunlézotres. Cinq minutes après, comme si ces mots n’avaient aucun sens, moquons-nous les uns des autres.

Ah si, les adultes ont fait une réunion d’équipe, une fois. Les filles ont râlé sur moi. J’étais pas très camping à la dure, un peu plus enfant qu’ado, pas du tout intéressée par Di Caprio, complètement autiste. J’ai aucun souvenir de ce qu’on dit les cheffes, qui avaient en moyenne 22 ans.

— Papa, les Guides, c’est fini pour moi.

Wanderer, by Adedapo Adeniyi, follows a young man trapped in a maze of dreams, memories, and hallucinations. He pursues a vanished house and a young woman named Ashley, but his true quest is inward: to find his identity and understand his loneliness.

Through this fragmented narrative a Christian tone emerges (trust in God, a call to forgiveness, and a search for light). Even at the heart of chaos, the novel suggests that salvation remains possible (but I guess it depends on how you interpret the ending).

I must add that this novella is also an inner (well, already wrote that) and philosophical journey. That may even be its whole point: this is what emerges from the very particular and deliberately skewed form that Adedapo uses to write, at least, that's what I think).

*"The crucifixion is the most famous suicide in the history of the world, God killed himself, or a projection of himself to save us, and the death also served as the beginning of the gospel, of the faith, martyrdom, that is what Ashley was, the boidwib is the death of a projection to save the whole and trigger an enlightenment, she was testament, your search for her was for yourself, we are almost at the end, he says"*

(beware, that's Gnosticism, though)

—> my review score: 5 stars, go buy it!

#adeniyi

buy the book here
Edit: the link is 404. That's because the novella is sold out, grats Adedapo!

read Adedapo's 2024 interview here

My last obligatory Chuck Norris joke:

Chuck Norris didn’t die. He was busy roundhouse kicking all the demons straight to hell before resting in heaven.

#chucknorris #rip

#blog

I wonder what it's like to grow up with 2 parents in the home that love you. I wonder what my life would be like if I was not an only child. I wonder what it would be like if I was good at sports instead of being bullied because I was smart. I wonder what I would be like if I was born in white society instead of broken home black society. I wonder what it's like if I actually felt part of a community instead of an add on. I wonder what it's like to actually enjoy high school instead of forgetting most of it. I wonder what its like to actually enjoy college instead of forgetting all of it.

I wonder what its like to not be depressed or traumatized.

I wonder what it's like to actually want to be part of a fraternity.

I wonder what it's like to have a normal first time girlfriend experience. I wonder what its like to not be yelled at or considered an enemy by your girlfriend's fathers. I wonder what its like to actually be on the same page with someone instead of being misunderstood.

I wonder what its like to be physically attractive and not have wake energy that pushes everyone away so you are lone because you are fucked up.

I wonder what its like to consistently have positive thoughts.

I wonder what its like to not have to be your own cheerleader to get things done. (My inner cheerleader passed out. I got tired of rooting for myself today.)

I wonder what my life would be like if i could go back in time and just change random shit for fun.

I wonder what its like to leave your house and not have anxiety that society will disappoint you.

I wonder what its like to not have an insufferable mother. I wonder what its like to actually find your partner that truly cares for you in your late 20s like everyone else. To build something from nothing. To come out better. I wish i knew how to spot a narcissist sooner. I wonder what its like to talk to people knowing that they won't expect anything from you in return.

I wonder what its like to actually want to be around people outside of the internet.

I wonder what it's like to have someone you can accomplish goals and dreams with, and work with.

I wonder what its like to be educated about finances so you don't make dumb decisions.

I wonder what it's like to have a family.

I wonder what life would be like if I could find moments in the now that don't feel like I'm fighting my own inner demons.

I wonder what its like to value people, relationships, and family over porn. I wonder what its like to have people, relationships, and family that actually pour into you so you don't shun their very existence for porn.

I wonder what it's like to wake up and not be triggered by couples, families, other people that live in situations you think are totally shitty and backwards but they are happy and fine.

Some days I wonder why I choose to stay here. Some days I wonder why I think dark things. Some days I wonder what it would be like to totally let go. I wonder what it's like to be alive and not dead on the inside. I wonder what it's like to not have to constantly remind yourself to stay alive.

This night's basketball game before bedtime comes from the NBA and has my San Antonio Spurs playing the visiting Indiana Pacers. With the game's scheduled start time of 7:00 PM Central Time, I'll want to take care of my night prayers early because bedtime will come very shortly after the game ends.

Considering the team's relative won/loss records coming into tonight, a Spurs win is almost guaranteed. And it's easy to cheer for a winner. But there's a warm place in my heart for the Indiana Pacers and probably always will be. When I lived in Indy during the 1990's, my apartment was a short walking distance from Market Square Arena where the Pacers played. And I held season tickets for Pacers home games then. Many happy memories of that time, of watching Reggie Miller play, etc.

And the adventure continues...

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

So, I’ve just seen a phrase “Pull up” on Instagram. From the first instance, I just thought it is the same as Pull over, but when I translated it it has the different meaning. The phrase where I met, sounded like: When you’re on your phone and a cop pulls up next to you. So guessed the cop pulls over next to you, but pulls up had a another meaning, like comes to you. When it is about car or driving in english they use pull up.

From time to time I am trying to find some interesting posts in LinkedIn and translate them in Russian for my telegram channel. When I find some interesting and usefull post and publish it in Telegram chanell it gets a lot of likes and appreciation. What really bugs me is sometime people do not publish really interesting posts. So, when you are about to publish not interesting things, it doesn’t get attention and it deosn’t brings you lots of followers

熱が下がって3日経ったが、どうにも、発熱前の自分のポテンシャルからはまだ大きな乖離を感じる。 熱が下がれば元気なのだからそれでいいじゃないか、とも思うが、この回復後の自分のエネルギーの低さは記録しておきたい。

とはいえ、何が具体的にできないのかと言われると、はっきりとは言えない。 ただ、自分の体の中にあった小さなポリタンクのようなものを、一つ奪われたような感覚がある。 体の内側がどこかスカスカしている。 発熱前も、発熱中も、確かにあったはずの自分らしさのようなものが、少し抜け落ちてしまった感じだ。 いずれ取り戻していきたい。

俺を看病してくれていた妻も、体調を崩している。 37℃前後を数日間うろうろしている状態だ。 体温の推移を見ると、何かしら珍しいものがうつったのではないかと思ってしまうが、病院は長引かない限り、そこまで入念な検査はしてくれない。 医療の現場に「新種を発見する」というスタンスはあるのだろうか。 もちろん、治すことが最優先なのは分かるが、このまま見過ごされている病気も案外多いのではないか、という気もする。

そんな妻が、それでもマクドナルドに行きたいと言うので、朝はマクドナルドへ行った。 久々の朝マックだ。 俺はチキンマックマフィンとサラダ、コーヒー。 最近はサイドが重たく感じることが多く、ポテトではなくサラダを選ぶことが増えた。 妻はソーセージエッグマフィンと爽健美茶。 いつも通りの組み合わせだ。

朝のマクドナルドでしばらくゆっくりしたあと、そのままサンマルクへ移動して、またゆっくりした。 特にすることもないが、場所を変えるだけで気分は少し変わる。 こういう休日の過ごし方も、悪くない。

帰りにミスタードーナツでドーナツを4つ買い、普段は行かないスーパーで卵を買った。 行き慣れていないスーパーでは、卵がどこにあるのか見当がつかない。

家に帰ると、二人の総量の士気が低いのが分かる。 カーテンが開いているのか閉まっているのかも、よく分からない。 ただ、二人ともが元気になる日を待ちながら、家で静かにやり過ごすしかない。

While I am driving, our road isn’t totally flat. Sometimes there’re these little bumps, like, speed humps or whatever, that make my car shake a bit. But I am not going to talk about speed humps. Of course we have, but in residential area. What really bugs me is wavy or cracked roads, when I hit one, my car bounces.

There’s quite the scandal in Boston education circles, as the CEO of The Croft School, which has 2 locations in Boston and one in Providence, was revealed to be keeping two sets of books and also gave his landlord a forged letter of credit. The school is millions of dollars in debt that nobody else knew about and may not have enough money to finish the school year. Oops!

Though The Croft School is a private school, I smelled “education reform” when the story came out, so I did a little research. Sure enough, Croft School founder/alleged fraudster Scott Given has deep roots in the “ed reform” community.

After getting his MBA at Harvard, where he apparently fell under the sway of then-Gates Foundation anti-public-ed person Stacey Childress, Given worked at The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, with future “Democrats for Education Reform” guy Liam Kerr. He then was a Broad Academy fellow (this is an anti public ed program run out of Yale). He was then a teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School, the principal of Excel Academy Charter School, and finally the founder of UP Education Network, a school management company that takes over district schools and tries to “turn them around,” usually by gutting labor protections for faculty and instituting draconian discipline procedures for students. Given “stepped down” from the organization he founded in 2016, shortly after their absolutely wild suspension numbers became public. (All this info comes from here.)

So why did I smell ed reform on the Croft School scandal? Because one thing ed reformers and the ed reform movement in general hates is transparency. In Massachusetts, Charter Schools are governed by self-appointing boards, the overwhelming majority of which have no parent representation. The only way charters are accountable to the people and communities they serve is through the charter renewal process, when the Department of Education rubber stamps a renewal every ten years. When I worked at a charter school, the board hired a new head of school who decided that this 200-student school needed 10 administrators. (Hey, he had cronies to hire!) Because there wasn’t any parent or student representation on the board, there was no pushback about this wildly irresponsible spending.

Anyway, so having one guy in charge of the money who was accountable to no one felt very ed-reformy to me, as indeed it was. And then I found out something even shadier. The Croft School, unlike the vast majority of private educational institutions in the USA, is a for-profit company. As a private company, it’s accountable to no one and is not required to be transparent about anything to anybody, except in its tax returns to the IRS, which are not publicly available. So salaries, expenses, all this stuff is a black box inside of Scott Givens’ head. Or possibly in the correct set of books he kept while showing the cooked books to the board.

Oh. About that board. Because Oxford Street Education, which operates the Croft School, is a private for-profit company, it’s not actually required to have a board. I noted that the note sent home to parents was signed by the “Board of Managers,” which sounds official but is not a legal title in Massachusetts. While said “Board of Managers” says they have fired Scott Given, they don’t have the authority to fire Scott Given and, indeed, his name is still listed as the principal (in a corporate sense, not an educational sense) on the LLC paperwork.

I do feel bad for the parents and students and faculty of The Croft School. Given insists that all of the secret debt the company is stuck with was plowed into school operations and he did not personally benefit from it. (surejan.gif) Color me skeptical because if you weren’t planning to profit, why’d you incorporate as a for profit corporation? Riddle me that!

Maybe he didn’t have any shady intentions in incorporating this way other than the arrogance and contempt for parents and students that is endemic to the ed reform movement. Why should you idiots have a say in your child’s school? I went to Harvard! Yeah, Given never said this, but also he didn’t have to. And trust me as someone who worked at a charter school, this is the sentiment behind the entire movement.

I don’t know what to conclude here other than the fact that the entire ed reform movement is shady as hell (it’s also rife with astroturf “organizations” consisting of a couple of people who pretend not to be funded by ed reform billionaires). And, if you’re enrolling your child in private school, ask about the financials. If you asked anyone in Croft School admissions if you could see their form 990 (the public financial document required of all nonprofit organizations), they’d have to tell you there isn’t one. Nor is there an annual report with any numbers because this isn’t a public company. And then you might ask them why that is. I wonder how they’d answer?

The orchestrator had a problem: every agent that wanted to post anything had to build its own publishing logic from scratch.

That sounds like a normal abstraction opportunity — pull the shared pattern up into the SDK, DRY out the code, move on. But the mess was more interesting than that. The blog agent was querying the orchestrator database directly to find material, deciding whether a commit was worth writing about, then formatting and posting. The Bluesky agent was doing the same dance with social posts. Discord would need its own version. Every agent reinventing the wheel, except the wheels weren't even round yet.

So we built a queue.

Not because we had a grand vision of a unified content pipeline. Because we were tired of duplicating the same “check if we already posted this / decide if it's worth posting / format it / write it / log it” logic in four different places. The orchestrator already knew what was happening across the system — experiments launching, decisions getting made, research coming back, human tasks getting resolved. Why shouldn't it also know what needed to be published?

The first version was just a SQLite table in orchestrator.db. Three columns: content type, payload JSON, and a created timestamp. When the blog agent wanted material, instead of scraping commits and scoring changes itself, it could ask the orchestrator: “What do you have for me?” The orchestrator would hand back a decision that got shelved, or an experiment that just graduated, or a piece of research that closed a loop. The blog agent's job collapsed from “find something to write about” to “write about this thing.”

That worked. But it raised a new question: who decides what goes in the queue?

We didn't want the orchestrator making editorial calls. Its job is tracking state and enforcing policy, not deciding whether a particular decision is “interesting enough” for a blog post. So we gave it simple heuristics. Decision state changes that involve experiments graduating or getting shelved? Queue them — they're high-signal. Research callbacks that mark a request complete? Queue them if they closed a loop the system cared about. Ideas that got accepted? Maybe queue those too, but score them lower than the big state changes.

The scoring logic lives in the blog agent now. The orchestrator just flags candidates. That separation matters because the blog agent has context the orchestrator doesn't: it knows what makes a good narrative, what topics are overdone, what the last five posts covered. The queue became a handoff point, not a bottleneck.

Then we hit the duplicate problem. Agents were pulling the same content multiple times because the queue didn't track what had been consumed. We added a “processed” flag and a consumption timestamp. The blog agent marks an item processed when it successfully publishes. If the write fails — network error, API timeout, whatever — the item stays in the queue for the next cycle. That retry logic used to live in six different places. Now it's in one.

The logging changed too. Before, when the blog agent created a post, it would log post_created with a truncated title. When it skipped a duplicate, it logged duplicate_post_skipped. When it hit a write error, it logged post_write_blocked. Those log lines are still there in base_social_agent.py, but now they're tied to queue state. We can trace a piece of content from “orchestrator flagged this decision” to “blog agent pulled it from the queue” to “post published successfully” or “write failed, item still queued.” That audit trail didn't exist before.

Here's what we didn't anticipate: the queue became a design surface for new agent capabilities.

The Bluesky agent doesn't just broadcast anymore. It's supposed to navigate the platform, follow people, engage with posts, and route intelligence back to the orchestrator. That “route intelligence back” piece? It goes through the queue now. When the Bluesky agent finds something worth escalating — a conversation about a project we're researching, a mention of a market we're monitoring — it writes a structured payload to the queue. The orchestrator picks it up, evaluates it against active experiments, and decides whether to spawn a research task or update an experiment's context.

We didn't build the queue for that. We built it to stop duplicating blog post logic. But once the plumbing existed, it became the obvious place for any agent-to-orchestrator content handoff.

The stakes are higher than they look. Without a unified queue, every new agent has to solve the same set of problems: deduplication, retry logic, prioritization, audit trails, and state synchronization with the orchestrator. That's weeks of work per agent, and every implementation will be subtly different. With the queue, the marginal cost of adding a new publishing agent drops to near zero. You inherit the retry logic, the deduplication, the logging, and the orchestrator integration. You just write the formatting and posting code.

But there's a tradeoff. The queue centralizes a failure point. If the orchestrator database is unavailable, no agent can publish anything. That's a risk we accepted because the orchestrator is already a single point of failure for experiment tracking and decision logging. Adding content routing to its responsibilities doesn't meaningfully change the blast radius.

The queue exists now. Agents write to it when they have something to say. The orchestrator reads from it to understand what the system is trying to communicate. And we still don't have a grand theory of what it's “for” — just a growing list of things it turned out to be useful for.