I Once Played On A Jungle Gym I Called Dear Old Dad

From Our Correspondent in middle America:

Relationships with fathers have been strained all over these United States since masculinity was defeated by sonar & wit. To finance the NRA memberships & the stripped clutches, men of America have taken on health club memberships & subscribed to online gaming/porn sites to make ends meet. But was it always thus?

If there's anything we need to discuss in this War On Sailing, it's perspective. Not to be confused with Perspective, which was an Innovation of the Renaissance - itself a major turning point in this hateful, senseless, stupid war - but simple perspective: a sense that not only do you know where the butter on your side of the bread is coming from, but also how it might actually affect the cholesterol of your other meals not currently associated with butter nor bread. Therefore it behooves us as educators & litigators to look back into the past & ask ourselves: patriarchy, what the hell?

There are three interesting historical models which may serve as skin blisters on the road to today's ridiculous ruin of modern manhood. All three are at the very least documented, even if that documentation begins here:

1) Ancient Persia: the manly swagger. With interest in Persia increasing as American invasion draws near - &/or with the popularity of ball-less entertainment like 300, itself a particularly nasty bit of back-hair-shaving defeat - it's fascinating to note that testicles first dropped in Persia nearly four thousand years ago. Fossils from the period show that, before that period, men & the other seven sexes tended to walk roughly the same. After this siren moment, you could tell a man by the way he walked.

2) The Far East - the closer Far East, though: Ruins completely destroyed by bored soldiers during the Vietnam War showed interesting markings which scholars have gleaned from highly medicated veterans with PTSD in a series of remarkable interviews conducted for the past thirty years over the phone disguised as telemarketing calls quizzing subjects about their long distance rates. These ruins evidently tell of a two-hundred-year-long bachelor party which did not - some even argue could not - end in marriage. While reports of American GIs "going native" when the ruins were discovered are unconfirmed - & have in fact been made up by me - I confess I'll be consulting on a Hollywood movie on this subject for the next few months. Apologies if I don't return your calls.

3) Homosexuality in Cleveland, circa 1972: Two camps have sprung up in the discussion of homosexuality in the War On Sailing - two rivalries that have shaken the foundations of this young but important scholarly pursuit. From an outside perspective (I've never had homosexual relations with a scholar), the two camps might be described as "the Frisky" & "the Flabbergasted." In particular, a meeting of the Closet Club of Cleveland in May (some say June) 1972 came as close as we can tell to predicting changing roles for men in the late twentieth century. While the gay men in the club pretended to be selling closets wholesale, the police began investigating similar clubs for possible fraud. The subsequent "outing" of the club & the end to fabulous parties in Cleveland for a decade sent a shock through the zeitgeist of the time. It is worth noting that that particular shock was sent through the mails & was the first shock to utilize the new "zip code" system.

While it may be tempting to draw a line from a to c to b in this situation, further research will doubtless need to be done. Some even recommend sandblasting. While many of us continue to fret over the changing state of manhood in North America today, it is worth noting that, when some of us read, our lips still move.

Wilbur Cormorant, middle America