The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I grew up watching Roy Rogers and John Wayne. We pretty much all did. Now we watch violent video games and Tarantino movies. If that isn’t plenty enough, turn on the news at 6. We Americans are a violent bunch of yahoos. Okay, we American men are a violent bunch of yahoos. We like it, apparently. Oh sure, when there’s a mass killing, we wring our hands and hold our heads and say, what can we do, what can we do? Then we repeat it in a day or two. It’s like shampooing — lather, then rinse. Blather, then wince. We mostly start to take it for granted.

Machismo, American style. I’ve had neighbors who carry a handgun down to the beach. For packs of dogs, they tell me. One, a little tough guy who apparently feared rabies or worse from roaming hordes of frothing seadogs, used it on himself later, the Hemingway ending, no rewrite, a Real guy’s way out. After all, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

You don’t see too many women lugging AR-15 assault rifles into the mall and letting loose a barrage of bullets at innocent shoppers. Maybe if Mom had given me a realistically bosomed Barbie doll to play with instead of that Hop-a-long Cassidy cap gun to play shoot-em-up, I’d be a tad more pacifist in my adult years. Okay, at least a teddy bear, if not swimwear Barbie. Who knows? I’m not a psychologist, but hey, a lifetime of male heroes who beat the crap out of their opponents or just dispatched them with a well-placed bullet, I’m betting our propensity to settle arguments with our fists or our .38’s might be diminished without estrogen if we weren’t constantly told that being a man in this society meant having the courage to smash an opponent ruthlessly.

Course, I’m not sure walking down the Mean Streets with a Barbie is the answer either … but it might open up the public discourse in a gentler way than the NRA’s.

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