"I'd shoot 'im and live alone."

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

"I'd shoot 'im and live alone."

That's what my grandmother used to say when she heard about some man abusing or maligning or short-shrifting his wife, or in any way otherwise behaving like a misogynist, low-life cretin. "Honestly," she'd say. "Why does she put up with it?  I'd shoot 'im and live alone." Hard to argue with that logic.  But where might this sort of loathsome male behaviour come from? Well, let's have a little Bible study here. In Paul's epistle to Timothy we read this:
 

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjugation
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.
Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue infaith and charity and holiness with sobriety."                1 Tim. 2. 11-15                                                                                                        

Golly. Well, it's no secret that St. Paul wasn't much on the ladies, but it's not hard to see that there's a bit of a social conundrum here. Apparently the only way for a woman of the species to redeem herself is by knowing her place, shutting up, and bearing a fruitful womb - plus I guess being really serious and not boozing at all. Or at least that's how I read it. Now, my Grammy was herself a good Christian woman, a Scotch Baptist, a MacLennan, and not much inclined to suffer ungodly activities. But she also had an abidingly wicked and volatile sense of humour, and nothing so offended her underlying wellspring of mirth as the prospect of some self-important ape assuming moral authority - or indeed any authority - over a woman. Apparently she had either glossed over this particular bit of Scripture, or had long ago determined that Paul was either a gibbering impostor infesting the otherwise hale body of the Good News, or that he had maybe eaten a few bad dates somewhere along the road to Damascus. Either way, she wasn't going to have any of it. Be damned!

What exactly are the rights and responsibilities of a man then? What is a man really good for? If we can breezily assume that lording it over women doesn't actually come with the job description, just how does a man warrant his place in the Sun? It can be a disquieting question. I've been trying to piece it together myself these many years. And I think I've come up with a few basic tenets. For a man to earn the right of co-habitation with a woman, there are, it seems to me, certain entry-level minimum requirements and expectations  -  and not just putting down the toilet seat either, although that never hurts. Because trying to horde access to power and the divine just because you've got testicles doesn't really cut it anymore. Those days are done. A man's gotta pay, and pay well. So..........

A real man's capability list (and I'm talking about bare minimums here): 

• Fix the car (no brainer - duh, yeah dude) 
• Cook a good meal
• Ride a horse
• Build a house
• Sing a song when called upon
• Run a chain saw
• Offer a decent toast
• Recite a poem
• Stand up to bullies

This is just 'Being a Decent and Useful Man 101' - bare bones. There's lots of other valuable stuff a man might do, such as hold down a job, pick up his gaunchies, do some laundry, shave, abandon the NHL, read 'Sex and Destiny: the Politics of Human Sexuality' by Germaine Greer, question roles, meditate on whether or not his puberty might have failed (clues: - still obsessed with toys? -  apoplectic during sporting events? -  wants what's 'his'? -  demands to be heard…waaah! waah!?  -  gets sex and guns mixed up? -  feels compelled to 'impress'? -  polishes his truck all the time?), remember birthdays and anniversaries, apologize when necessary, respect all living things, listen to children, don't shoot bears, and generally just try to avoid letting his little head do the thinking. Of course, any single one of these might cause a man's brain to explode, but overall, given the current state of the world, I'd have to say it's worth the risk. What's a few cave-man noggins spattered around the landscape?

The sooner we recognize that this deep cultural dichotomy, falsely predicated on biological determinants, lies at the root of our appalling behaviour towards each other, our planet and its creatures, the sooner we might hope to take the necessary fork in the road towards a brighter tomorrow. One likes to be fair, but I think we've given us menfolk more than enough slack to show how we do things, and it seems time enough to try something new - like sanity, for instance. All red-blooded men love a horse-race, but surely it's time to shut down this particular track, 'cuz all we ever see on the card are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - and no matter how bets are placed, humankind always comes out the loser. If the Human Enterprise were to be an entity in the private sector, it's CEO and Board of Directors would get their asses summarily hauled out of their fancy chairs - because they have been squandering our collective capital, including that of the planet itself, in order to cover operating costs and accrue unearned profit. And any dime-store, long-term, cost-benefit analysis will tell you that this is a model for collapse. You can't keep spending you collateral. 

In the Greek comedy 'Lysistrata' by the satirist Aristophanes, the heroine, Lysistrata, has become fed up with the miseries of the Peloponnesian War. She convinces the women of Greece to withhold sexual favours from their men in order to force them to cease fighting and negotiate peace. It was, in its day, a radical and barbed commentary on the state of politics, dominance and excess. But its immediacy hasn't diminished one bit. The impulses that bring about ongoing conflict, within which women and children are the perennial victims, continue unabated. The good news (small case) is that more and more young women are making their way into post-secondary education and beginning to assume, poco a poco, positions of power within academia, government and business. The unforgotten events at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique have only steeled them further. It's a hard road, and much kicking and screaming and pawing and bellowing can be heard as the bulls are herded down their respective chutes. But it is a necessary transformation. And it's no longer good enough to just accept a handful of so-called 'women' in power who only serve to propagate conventional modes. Maggie Thatcher was a dramatic and effective figure, but surely merely was, as Ronald Reagan admiringly quipped - "...the best damn man in England." She ran a bull's game, crushing popular dissent in the coal mines, force-feeding now-failed house mortgages on the lower middle classes, and sending off the fleet, replete with cocky Prince Andrew, to crush the hapless Argentineans over a scrap of guano-flecked rock in the south Atlantic.  

What if, however, we men were similarly called to account today, as in Aristophanes' play, over spewing thousands of barrels of oil onto shorelines, or stripping vast tracts of forest, or killing soils over entire continents, or forcing peasant farmers to buy sterile seed, or propagating religious creed that breeds hatred and denigrates women, or squandering money on the tools of war that might otherwise feed children, or pawning our global inheritance for a couple quick bucks and a weekend in Vegas? If Lysistrata were among us today, there might be an awful lot of aching blue-balls around the place, until we stopped waging war on the future, and started negotiating peace with our very grandchildren. Because it seems like we just can't help doing the same schtick over and over and over again. Jeepers. You'd think we'd get tired of it. 

I'm white, six and a half feet tall, and weigh around 190 pounds. I've never given a second's thought to going in any bar, or dark alley, or lonely stretch of road, or speaking my mind as I saw fit. I've never been bullied, intimidated, threatened (by a sane or sober person anyway), or in any way made to feel that my own destiny wasn't mine alone to choose. I have, in short, moved with ease through a man's world. Because of that, I have at times tried to imagine myself as a small, brown woman, and attempted, to the extent possible, to imagine just what the world might look like from her perspective. That world might as well be orbiting in some distant galaxy. How can I imagine such a thing - to live in a state of trepidation and struggle?

My Grampy survived. He was a good man - modest, diligent and creative. And so she left the shotgun in the closet. Lucky for me, I guess, or I might have missed my go 'round in this beautiful life. But there is another prominent woman in Greek lore - her name is Gaia - the Earth. If she thinks anything like my grandmother did, we better start looking over our shoulders. It's four in the morning, the boys have been out carousing, and that ominous cha-chunk sound might just be the cosmic shell sliding smoothly into its chamber.


Phil Burpee
December 10, 2011



Phil Burpee is a carpenter and farmer living north of Pincher Creek.
He keeps an eye on the world from under the big Alberta sky.