Fw: lengthy...but worth the read
Posted by: amazinggraze <amazinggraze@...>
From: <mgblubaugh@ashland.com>
To: <amazinggraze@valkyrie.net>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 1:43 PM
Subject: lengthy...but worth the read
>
> good stuff......stay with it
>
>
> PEGGY NOONAN
>
> Welcome Back, Duke
> From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues.
>
> Friday, October 12, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
>
> A few weeks ago I wrote a column called "God Is Back," about how, within
> a day of the events of Sept. 11, my city was awash in religious
> imagery--prayer cards, statues of saints. It all culminated, in a way,
> in the discovery of the steel-girder cross that emerged last week from
> the wreckage--unbent, unbroken, unmelted, perfectly proportioned and
> duly blessed by a Catholic friar on the request of the rescue workers,
> who seemed to see meaning in the cross's existence. So do I.
>
> My son, a teenager, finds this hilarious, as does one of my best
> friends. They have teased me, to my delight, but I have told them,
> "Boys, this whole story is about good and evil, about the clash of good
> and evil." If you are of a certain cast of mind, it is of course
> meaningful that the face of the Evil One seemed to emerge with a roar
> from the furnace that was Tower One. You have seen the Associated Press
> photo, and the photos that followed: the evil face roared out of the
> building with an ugly howl--and then in a snap of the fingers it lost
> form and force and disappeared. If you are of a certain cast of mind it
> is of course meaningful that the cross, which to those of its faith is
> imperishable, did not disappear. It was not crushed by the millions of
> tons of concrete that crashed down upon it, did not melt in the furnace.
> It rose from the rubble, still there, intact.
>
> For the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the face of
> the Evil One was revealed, and died; for the ignorant, the superstitious
> and me (and maybe you), the cross survived. This is how God speaks to
> us. He is saying, "I am." He is saying, "I am here." He is saying, "And
> the force of all the evil of all the world will not bury me."
>
> I believe this quite literally. But then I am experiencing Sept. 11 not
> as a political event but as a spiritual event.
>
> And, of course, a cultural one, which gets me to my topic.
>
> It is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style
> of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country
> since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the
> past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth
> to get our great country out of the fix it was in.
>
> I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and
> haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred
> pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who
> are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are
> all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men
> who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever
> takes its place.
>
> And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for
> their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for
> strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.
>
> You didn't have to be a fireman to be one of the manly men of Sept. 11.
> Those businessmen on flight 93, which was supposed to hit Washington,
> the businessmen who didn't live by their hands or their backs but who
> found out what was happening to their country, said goodbye to the
> people they loved, snapped the cell phone shut and said, "Let's roll."
> Those were tough men, the ones who forced that plane down in
> Pennsylvania. They were tough, brave guys.
>
>
>
>
> Let me tell you when I first realized what I'm saying. On Friday, Sept.
> 14, I went with friends down to the staging area on the West Side
> Highway where all the trucks filled with guys coming off a 12-hour shift
> at ground zero would pass by. They were tough, rough men, the grunts of
> the city--construction workers and electrical workers and cops and
> emergency medical worker and firemen.
> I joined a group that was just standing there as the truck convoys went
> by. And all we did was cheer. We all wanted to do some kind of volunteer
> work but there was nothing left to do, so we stood and cheered those who
> were doing. The trucks would go by and we'd cheer and wave and shout
> "God bless you!" and "We love you!" We waved flags and signs, clapped
> and threw kisses, and we meant it: We loved these men. And as the
> workers would go by--they would wave to us from their trucks and buses,
> and smile and nod--I realized that a lot of them were men who hadn't
> been applauded since the day they danced to their song with their bride
> at the wedding.
>
> And suddenly I looked around me at all of us who were cheering. And saw
> who we were. Investment bankers! Orthodontists! Magazine editors! In my
> group, a lawyer, a columnist and a writer. We had been the kings and
> queens of the city, respected professional in a city that respects its
> professional class. And this night we were nobody. We were so useless,
> all we could do was applaud the somebodies, the workers who, unlike us,
> had not been applauded much in their lives.
>
> And now they were saving our city.
>
> I turned to my friend and said, "I have seen the grunts of New York
> become kings and queens of the City." I was so moved and, oddly I guess,
> grateful. Because they'd always been the people who ran the place, who
> kept it going, they'd just never been given their due. But now--"And the
> last shall be first"--we were making up for it.
>
>
>
>
> It may seem that I am really talking about class--the professional
> classes have a new appreciation for the working class men of Lodi, N.J.,
> or Astoria, Queens. But what I'm attempting to talk about is actual
> manliness, which often seems tied up with class issues, as they say, but
> isn't always by any means the same thing.
> Here's what I'm trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a
> story--you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket
> tabloid like the National Enquirer--about an American man and woman who
> were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming
> in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark
> went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man
> did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it
> again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share
> his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations
> about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go
> of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife
> survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to
> deck the shark. I told my friends: That's what a wonderful man is, a man
> who will try to deck the shark.
>
> I don't know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very
> old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is
> coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is
> very good for our country.
>
> Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit
> wins wars. But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The
> return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple
> reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If
> you're a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League
> University you'll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair,
> but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men
> inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat.
> Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.
>
> It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is
> not easy. I know you are thinking, But it's not easy to be a woman, and
> you are so right. But women get to complain and make others feel bad
> about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men suck it up and
> remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the
> kind of men who are spoofed on "The Man Show"--babe-watching,
> dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of
> sissies.)
>
>
>
>
> I should discuss how manliness and its brother, gentlemanliness, went
> out of style. I know, because I was there. In fact, I may have done it.
> I remember exactly when: It was in the mid-'70s, and I was in my
> mid-20s, and a big, nice, middle-aged man got up from his seat to help
> me haul a big piece of luggage into the overhead luggage space on a
> plane. I was a feminist, and knew our rules and rants. "I can do it
> myself," I snapped.
> It was important that he know women are strong. It was even more
> important, it turns out, that I know I was a jackass, but I didn't. I
> embarrassed a nice man who was attempting to help a lady. I wasn't lady
> enough to let him. I bet he never offered to help a lady again. I bet he
> became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman
> or a businessman who says, "Let's roll."
>
> But perhaps it wasn't just me. I was there in America, as a child, when
> John Wayne was a hero, and a symbol of American manliness. He was
> strong, and silent. And I was there in America when they killed John
> Wayne by a thousand cuts. A lot of people killed him--not only feminists
> but peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals, others. You could even say it
> was Woody Allen who did it, through laughter and an endearing admission
> of his own nervousness and fear. He made nervousness and fearfulness the
> admired style. He made not being able to deck the shark, but doing the
> funniest commentary on not decking the shark, seem . . . cool.
>
> But when we killed John Wayne, you know who we were left with. We were
> left with John Wayne's friendly-antagonist sidekick in the old John Ford
> movies, Barry Fitzgerald. The small, nervous, gossiping neighborhood
> commentator Barry Fitzgerald, who wanted to talk about everything and do
> nothing.
>
> This was not progress. It was not improvement.
>
> I missed John Wayne.
>
> But now I think . . . he's back. I think he returned on Sept. 11. I
> think he ran up the stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of
> potatoes, came back down and shoveled rubble. I think he's in
> Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering silence,
> "Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy."
>
> I think he's back in style. And none too soon.
>
> Welcome back, Duke.
>
> And once again: Thank you, men of Sept. 11.
>
> Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her new
> book, "When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan," will be
> published by Viking Penguin this fall. Her column appears Fridays.
>
>
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>
> The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in
> moments of comfort and convenience, but where he
> stands at times of challenge and controversy.
> - Martin Luther King, Jr.
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