A Better Man

by Michael Ian Black

  She told me this kind of behavior was common, saying he “constantly abused and violently hurt my brother for years.”

  Later in life, the brother tried to kill himself several times. She thinks it was, in large part, a result of the abuse he suffered at the hands of their father. But when she talks about her dad she has sympathy for him, saying he wasn’t “a bad man,” but that instead, “He did the best he knew how . . . the way his father had taught him, and so on.”

  I suspect that, more often than not, when fathers hurt their sons it’s an expression of their own terrors. In a perverse way, they’re trying to prepare their boys for a world that will treat them even more harshly than they did. Be strong, they’re saying, because the weak do not survive.

  Strength is a man’s chief weapon against the world, the quality that keeps his fear at bay. Strength is protection and comfort and hope. There are, of course, many kinds of strength but they all serve the same purpose. It is the way we assert our place in the world and keep it. The first type of strength we think of is physical strength. It’s often the first thing men compare about each other. I have no empirical evidence to back this up, but I suspect guys find ourselves subconsciously sizing each other up. We don’t mean to. We don’t want to. But our male conditioning has trained us to ask ourselves the familiar primal question: Could I take him? I will admit to you right now, in my case the answer is always no.

  I mean, do you even lift, bro?

  As a boy, I remember comparing my own size and strength to my father’s and feeling as though I would never measure up. How could I possibly expect to ever reach my father’s otherworldly height of five feet and eight inches? Would I ever be able to, as he did, open a new jar of vacuum-sealed salsa with minimal strain and cursing? A child can imagine almost anything, but I found it hard to imagine I would ever be stronger than my father, a man who probably could not have mustered more than ten decent push-ups.

  To me, though, he was strong. As strong as any man. All fathers must seem incomparably mighty to their young children. Even I, twiggy as I am, felt the wonder of my own strength with you guys when you were little. I loved picking you up and carrying you under my arm like a gym bag, or swinging you onto my shoulders and parading you around like a maharaja.

  Strength like that is great but fleeting. You are already stronger than me, as you should be. You’re eighteen, I’m not. I want to encourage you, though, to flip the idea of strength on its head. There will be times when your deepest strength will come not from showing how much pain you can endure, but from allowing yourself to show that you are vulnerable.

  In his lectures, Jordan Peterson sometimes equates his philosophy with the example set by Jesus picking up his cross and carrying it, alone, through the Via Dolorosa. It’s a powerful image, the son of God silently enduring his torture; his body may be hurt, but his spirit cannot be punctured. Until it is. And here is where, to me, Peterson’s argument falls apart. On the cross, Jesus finally succumbs to his pain, calling out to his father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In that raw, agonizing moment he fully sheds his divinity and becomes one of us. Giving voice to suffering does not make you less of a man. It makes you more of a human.

  We think of strength—all forms of strength—as a possession: either I am strong or I am not strong. Maybe that’s a misapprehension. Maybe it’s better to think of strength as a kind of common trust, something we hold for a time and then pass around like a library book. Each of us has the ability to borrow strength when needed; Mom and I do it all the time. When I’m feeling sorry for myself about a job I didn’t get, or experiencing some seasonal malaise, or find myself growing anxious about the future, I lean on her. She does the same with me when she’s dealing with her own regrets and anxieties. Leaning on each other keeps both of us upright.

  Of course, this doesn’t happen just in marriage. Family, friends, community: those are our true strengths. If we are strong, it is because, over and over again, others have used their own muscles to make us so. And we, in turn, do the same for them. It’s an old idea—community—maybe just as old as “might makes right,” but it’s at odds with the way we think about men as rugged, self-sufficient individuals.

  Yes, you should be strong in the ways that people are strong. Yes, you should persevere. You should endure. You should summon from yourself the most that you have to give, and you should give as much of yourself as you are able when you are able. These ideas are deeply embedded in traditional masculinity. But that vision of masculinity falters at the place where strength fails. That’s the place where I am most interested in helping you because that’s the place where I think guys need the most help.

  There will be times in your life when you are not strong enough. When you do not know what else to do, where to turn; when you feel like you have given everything you can give. This is the moment where I want you to know that it’s okay to reach out a hand and allow others to pick you up. I want your sister to know this, too: how and when to persevere, and when to ask for help. Women struggle with this issue just as much as men. Their upbringing so often conditions them to always offer a hand, but rarely to ask for one. If the projection of masculinity relies on the projection of strength, asking for help can be seen as admitting weakness. The three most difficult words for a guy to say are not “I love you.” The three most difficult words for a guy to say are “I need help.”

  Allowing others to help us is just as important as offering help. This is a gift of our humanity, to give love and to allow others to give you their love. You can plan a funeral and mourn and whine all at the same time. You can be there for a friend on the phone. We all carry burdens. They will weigh us down and we will struggle with them, as we all must. It’s okay to reach out for a hand when you are climbing a steep hill or to ask another to sit with you to rest for a while. We’re strong, all of us. And, sometimes, we’re weak. All of us. Your vulnerabilities reveal you. Let them. When you don’t admit weakness, you close yourself off from receiving the strength of others, which is another way of saying you close yourself off from love. Instead, you twist the tourniquet a little bit tighter. You grow numb. Trust me. I spent most of my life that way.

  Looking back on it now, though, I wonder why. Why is it so important for men to keep their guard up? What are we protecting? Why should our entire sex be forever primed for battle? Why do we sacrifice the hearts of boys?

  seven

  Beer from a Leg

  Respect the Service of Others

  We used to take family vacations when I was a kid. Six people crammed into a two-tone green Pontiac Grand Prix. Hours upon hours of driving, Mom and Elaine’s crappy country music blaring from the AM dial. Every few hours we’d stop at a roadside picnic table to eat soggy ham sandwiches and sip warm soda from paper cups.

  Mom and Elaine always included an “educational element” on these excursions, some boring stop at some boring place where boring stuff happened a long time ago: Plymouth Rock, Colonial Williamsburg, Gettysburg. As a kid, I didn’t see how any of these places had any relevance to my life aside from whatever candies they sold in their gift shops.

  Gettysburg, in particular, was a snooze. They had a few cool cannons scattered about, and a gaudy monument memorializing the dead, but mostly it was a vast expanse of green, no more interesting to me than the farmers’ fields within a walk of our townhouse. I kicked at the grass, hoping I’d uncover an old sword or something, but all I found was dirt.

  The soldiers at Gettysburg fought over three days in July of 1863. Accounts from just after the battle talk about the field being covered with the bodies of the dead and wounded for miles around. A nurse named Cornelia Hancock describes the “sickening, overpowering, awful stench” from “dead bodies . . . lying in heaps on every side.” Between them, the two armies suffered a total of about 50,000 casualties; it took a week to clear the corpses from the field for burial. What kind of strength must it have taken to endure those three days? It seems superhuman to me.
Yet they were just guys, no different than you or me. Most of them weren’t professional soldiers; they were farmers, students, merchants. Men and boys sent to war.

  It was, and remains, America’s worst war. We’d been a nation for only four score and seven years, yet we’d already been in about two dozen armed conflicts. Overseas, Europe was in a state of near perpetual conflict, as were Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. All over the globe, men were killing each other, just as they had been for thousands of years. The killing would continue into the twentieth century and, now, into the twenty-first. Human history has mostly been a series of wars interrupted by occasional bursts of baby making.

  War, and the threat of war, has been our default setting for so long that we’ve oriented an entire gender around it. To make war, you need soldiers. To make soldiers, you need men.

  Women have also fought in wars since there have been wars, but their numbers have always been few. For all of recorded human history, it’s mainly been men marching back and forth across continents in the service of God and king, killing their enemies, taking what they wanted, however they wanted, burning the rest. In his remarkable book, War and Gender, Joshua S. Goldstein, professor emeritus of international relations at American University, writes, “Of the most warlike societies [ever] known, none requires women to participate in combat, and in all of them cultural concepts of masculinity motivate men to fight.”

  Those “cultural concepts” are key. When we emphasize aggression, strength, discipline, and pride in boys, we do so specifically because these exact qualities produce the best soldiers. When we de-emphasize empathy, creative thinking, self-expression, it’s because these qualities are not as desirable in soldiers. This is why we sacrifice the hearts of boys; it’s how we make soldiers.

  We feed our soldiers words like “honor” to justify the pain they cause and “sacrifice” to ennoble the pain they endure. We suppress, or even erase, their empathy. We elevate the cause of the nation above the suffering of its people and above the suffering of the people they fight. We elevate the ones best able to do these things as “heroes” and cast out, imprison, or kill the ones who are unwilling to perform these functions: those men are called “traitors” and “cowards.” Societies have often presented a stark choice to their nation’s boys and men: Assume your responsibilities as men and fight with us, or be removed from us. Be a soldier or be nothing. No sacrifice is too great to bear in order to secure the nation.

  Sometimes, as a kid, I’d lie awake wondering what I would do if I were ever asked to fight for my country. My main frame of reference for war back then was World War II, that noble campaign of the previous generation. Would I have gone? Yes, I thought. I would have volunteered, first in line to serve. Would I be brave? I thought I would be, yes. I would be the one to charge the Nazi machine gun nest, the one to jump on the grenade to save my buddies. Even when I was nine and ten years old, I knew I would never be the biggest boy, or the strongest. But I thought I could be brave.

  It’s funny: I never doubted my own bravery despite all evidence to the contrary. I should have known I was not cut out for heroics when the kisses of a neighbor’s dog crumpled me to the floor in terror. I have rarely been brave. Given the opportunity to stand up to bullies, I have usually demurred. When push came to shove, more often than not, I simply stepped aside.

  As I got older, I started mistaking snarkiness for bravery. In high school, I was quick with a snide remark, usually directed at the cool kids or the teachers or anybody to whom I felt inferior, which was everybody. I thought my jokes made me brave, but even then I knew I was risking nothing when I spouted off. There was no upside to kicking the ass of a scrawny kid like me. I could say what I wanted because nobody felt threatened by my doing so. My only weapon was my mouth. It was a peashooter.

  Once, during my senior year of high school, our local army recruiter called the house while some friends were over. The local recruiters called every high school senior boy to ask if we’d thought about enlisting. Usually I just said no and ended the conversation, but this time I decided to fuck with him.

  “I might be interested in enlisting,” I said to him over the phone. “What kinds of opportunities are there in the army for musical theater actors?”

  “Oh, many opportunities,” he lied.

  “That sounds very exciting,” I said. “Would being gay affect my chances of promotion?” This was when gay people weren’t allowed to serve, and if they discovered that you were gay, they kicked you out. The recruiter hemmed and hawed at my question as my friends stifled their laughter in the background. We weren’t laughing at gay people; we were laughing at his obvious discomfort. I hung up on him.

  It all felt like a joke to me. It wasn’t. Only a couple years later, the United States amassed an army and went to war in Iraq. When the first bombs fell, I was in San Antonio laid up with the flu while touring the country as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, my first paid acting job. The boy who’d been so sure of his own bravery had a job dressing up in a very different uniform from the one worn by his peers in a faraway desert. I felt small and stupid as I watched the war on TV, and I felt very glad not to be there.

  I was more than happy to let others stand in my place, and I knew who many of those others were: poor kids, minority kids, boys looking for discipline, or a way out of bad circumstances, boys from military families who walked the path of their fathers. Mostly boys with few other options. Back then, I didn’t think of myself as especially privileged; I certainly didn’t think I had come from much. But that was another lie I told myself.

  After Dad died, I had life insurance money. Not a lot, but enough to get me through college. I could dismiss military service because I never had to give it serious consideration. A lot of other guys my age didn’t have that choice. Duty had seemed so simple when I was a kid: when summoned, you went to war. When I was old enough to actually volunteer my service, though, I found it more prudent to watch the bombs go boom from the downy comfort of a hotel bed.

  There’s that line from Henry IV Part I, “The better part of valour is discretion.” Perhaps, but discretion is a luxury a lot of young American men can’t afford. Enlisting may be their ticket to college, a career, a handhold on the middle class. For many, their choice isn’t between discretion and valor, but discretion and opportunity.

  I remember driving over to the post office after I turned eighteen to register for the draft, as required by law. There’s no drama in filling out a form. You give the government information they already possess and wait for a letter you hope never comes. In doing so, you fulfill the barest duty of your citizenship as a man of this country. It’s a transaction, no more.

  You turned eighteen months ago. I picked up a form for you when Mom and I were out the other week, but it’s just been sitting, ignored, on the counter. I keep reminding you that you have to fill it out. “I will,” you say.

  I don’t press the issue.

  That first Iraq War was over in about a month. Around 380 Americans died, and as many as 100,000 Iraqis. Afterward, they threw a big parade called the National Victory Celebration. Soldiers and armored troop carriers and flatbed trucks showed off radar communications equipment. An announcer described the planes flying overhead as if it were a pep rally: “One key to air supremacy in the Gulf was the Air Force’s F-15 Eagle. . . . Eagles accounted for every Air Force kill during the first ten days of the war.” Little boys sitting on their dads’ shoulders waved tiny American flags.

  I watched with a confusing mixture of pride and guilt and the smug self-assuredness that comes from misplaced moral superiority. Big men showing off their war machines, I sneered, thinking about the terrible images I’d seen of Iraqi soldiers burnt to charcoal or bulldozed into giant sand graves, some of them while they were still alive. Like a lot of young, self-righteous liberals who stayed home, I recoiled at the disparities between Iraqi and American dead. Not because I wanted more Americans to die, of course, but because our overwhelming military a
dvantage felt like space-age barbarism. The celebration that followed smacked of chest-thumping. An end zone dance on freshly dug graves.

  Sixteen years before, we’d staggered out of Vietnam. Mine was the first generation that grew up in the shadow of a defeated America. I don’t know if Vietnam had a direct effect on the way American boys viewed themselves, but it’s interesting to look at the kinds of male TV and movie stars that popped up in this era: Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Alan Alda. These were different kinds of men from the matinee idols of old. They had less swagger, more sensitivity. Even the sex symbol Warren Beatty had a gentleness about him, more in line with John Lennon than John Wayne.

  Was this the new American man? And was this a new kind of America? Not so much.

  In the early ’80s, the culture swung back toward traditional masculinity with the election of a movie star from an earlier era, Ronald Reagan: tough-talking, cowboy-boot wearing, impenetrable. White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater once said about his boss, “It’s a special enigma of Ronald Reagan, that people who were closest to him still would have trouble telling you what makes him tick.” For a large percentage of Americans sick of Woodstock-era navel-gazing, the election of a former Western star as national sheriff probably seemed like a pretty good idea.

  It’s interesting to compare two movies that came along at this time. First Blood, released in 1982 (based on the book from 1972), is about a troubled drifter, a Vietnam veteran who gets caught up in a violent confrontation with a small-town police force. It could easily be seen as an indictment against the kind of aggression its protagonist feels forced into using. Its sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, came out in 1985 during the height of the “Reagan Revolution.” Rambo has its protagonist, now fully jacked up, taking up arms on a mission from the U.S. government to find POWs still being held by the Vietnamese ten years after the war’s end. Rambo’s salvation rests on whether he can redeem the honor of his nation.