True Grit!

A: "Be a man!"
B: "No, thank you, Sir."
A: "What? What are you? A wimp? A sissy? A girl?"
B: "If you say so, Sir."
A: "What's wrong with you? Don't you have any sense of honor? No self respect?"
B: "Escuse me, Sir?"
A: "Put up your dukes!"
B: "You seem to be getting upset, Sir."
A: "You are disgusting! Stand up like a man!"
B: "Is something bothering you, Sir?"
A: [ loses his temper ]
B: "Please calm down, Sir. I fear you might hurt me."
A: [ continues to incoherently rage; physically attacks B, strangles him and snaps his neck ]
B: [ dies ]
A: "Coward! Probably had 'premissive' parents. Not like my son! C'mon, kid, let's get moving!"
K: "I'm so proud of you, Dad. I'm going to grow up and be a real man, just like you! I'm not good at speaking, but I can always carry the ball, like my hero, our President Biden!"
A: "My son!" [ gives him a manly slap on his back ]
K: [ smiles and coughs! ]

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True grit versus Precision breaings: A parable

Middle aging males, from blue collars to MBAs, Archie Bunkers, whose highest attined level of education is watching NFL football or the Yankees on the televison, enjoy pontificating out of their oral orifices the to them romantic fantasy of "true grit": Pay your dues. Be a man. Win one fo the gipper. Etcetera and so forth, or whatever other cliches that drop out of their heads like if you a penny in the slot of an old penny gumball vending machine and out came a gumball. True: grit.^[1]

How can you easily and effectively destroy a precision bearing: throw a handfull of sand into the works. The tight-tolerances polished surfaces which fight friction will get abraded and the grit will cause the mechanism to seize. Similarly the fate of an educated mind vis-à-vis characterological "true grit". Get thee to the locker room, "men", and expose our penises to each other, guys, like the best thing you can do with ourselves, but at least that doesn't harm third parties outside the lockeroom door (if it has one) like waving the flag and firing artillery shells to have Fourth of July fireworks fun for real, leading form th rear, most likely, of course. More privates than generals die in wars even though sometimes the latter are the ones who want the war more.

Uneducated and uncultured people may have nothing to live to aspire forward for, but only blood and soil from the past to to die for. So they can easily be motivated to sacrifice what has little value: their empty present and future life. It is well known that the higher a person's standard of living, i.e.: the more people have, the less likely they are to want to give it up, which is why religions and governments often try to keep people poor. Having nothing nor hope of more, they have little to want to keep from losing, so they can be excited to give what ittle they have up.

Occasional festivals and sacraments provide relief and distraction from the tedium of their days, which otherwise are a wheel of karma just reproducing individual and species life, not creating anything (escept children, of course, which are another distraction and reason to die: for the next generation, which is just a duplicates palimsest of the present used to be next generation, but the futility of that is not foregrounded to them.... Christmas is coming! Uh, huh: Another next one just like all the previous next ones....).

Back to the metaphor, or maybe meatphor: to provide meat to feed an orthodoxy perpetuating itself. True grit is about being able to survivin gadversity: having sand thrown in your mechanism. It's Timex mentality: to be able to take a licking and keep on ticking. Subtleties and nuance, neither yes nor no but maybe or maybe not... has little or no place here.

The life of he mind is like a precision ball bearing: more complex and also more fragile than the treetrunk axle with a big round rock with a hole in the middle attached at each end on Fred Flintstone's cart; it is an antipode to "true grit". One grain of sand wrecks a ball bearing. So a culture of "true grit" is a society of meatheads. One ploy may be for them to protest that they didn't mean it that way. Well, then, what did they mean? What were they trying by saying one thing but meaning something different to hope to get away withslipping into the mechanism? Or were they looking for a free lunch: of course we expect you to be intelligent sincs that's no sweat. (Now, children, what it the moral of the story of the tortoise and the hare? Yes Bradford? "That slow and steady beats fast and fickle, but fast and steady gets 'em both off your back, Mx. Teach. Get the stupid race over with, and then you can have safe fun!" Yeah....)

"What's that grinding noise in the engine, Fred?" "Don't worry, Wilma. Just put the pedal to the metal and it'll fix itself."

Everybody in Ukraine seems to have true grit

Everybody in Ukraine looks like they have true grit. All the men look like the role Mr. Zelensky plays of freedom fighter commando-in-a-green t-shirt. With the difference that he's a comedian playing a role and they are apparently "the real deal". Trains "running on schedule" through Russian artillery bombardment.

They all look like they can take a licking and keep on ticking. Hardened if not brutal men, with all the grace of a Sherman tank crunching through the Ardennes at The Battle of the Bulge. I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) would not like being in such a place one bit; they can have it and keep it.

Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero. Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero."

(Bertolt Brecht)

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