Where Have the Men Gone?

To the right we have a photograph from the old movie The Wild Bunch. The actors are, from left to right, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. The film, was, in the opinion of your faithful correspondent, one of the last films that portrayed men and was acted in by men.

We now have films about superheroes played by emotional boys. Consider Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films. His character survives incidents that would kill any mortal and he does things that a team could not do. Or Matt Damon in the Bourne films. Bourne seems to be able to outsmart a CIA that is more God-like than governmental i.e., lazy time servers. Cruise and Damon, among others of their acting generation, separate themselves from the great unwashed masses and restrict their appearances before the public to movie premieres and film festivals when not pushing silly religions or silly pseudo-scientific causes like man made global warming.

In the past the male actors such as those in the photo proved themselves willing to show themselves as men who believed in something other than pet projects. Borgnine spent two different enlistments in the Navy, one before and one during World War 2, and finished his enlistment as a Chief Gunner's Mate. Holden put his own money into the conversation of African wildlife and didn't stand on the local church steeple shouting "Save the antelope." Johnson lived the life of a decent man asking no recognition, but showing what decency was. Oates, well, was Oates. He lived a rough life but never involved himself in scandal. He was, probably more than we'd like to admit, like most of us.

And we can add others. Glenn Ford preferred to hang out with the workers of his local service station than the Hollywood crowd. Clark Gable knew cars and worked on cars (not hiring someone else to do it like say, Jay Leno) and would even set the timing of a newspaperman's car when the newspaperman had come to interview him. Eddie Albert planted and maintained a large vegetable garden on his Beverly Hills spread and didn't expect a hireling to farm it and he didn't boast about it like, say, Ed Begley Jr.

So what can we learn from this? Simply that there was a time when men who had the good fortune to make a good living as actors never lost their sense that, whatever their degree of talent, they were lucky or fortunate and that they were not special. They never considered themselves among the elite. And they never forgot that they were men more than they were actors. They knew that to be a man was to travel an often difficult road doing things that were not easy, but were right. Like the gang in the Wild Bunch at the end of the movie.

The Prize Gets Gored

There was a time when the Nobel Peace Prize meant something. It was awarded as a reward and for the recognition of someone who had worked for peace or for the relief of suffering in the world. Theodore Roosevelt, considered by some one of the more belligerent American presidents despite that there were no wars in which America was involved during his administration, won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Teresa of Calcutta won for her work among the poor of India.

The Prize has always been a gauge of its time. But there was a time when the Committee at least pretended that it was looking at the influence of the receipt's work over the long term instead of the season. This is evinced by the awarding of the Prize to Henry Kissinger (partially responsible for the fall of Vietnam and the resulting suppression of freedom in that nation as well as Cambodia and Laos), Jimmy Carter (who never met a terrorist he didn't like) and Yasser Arafat (nephew of the vile Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and one of the inventors of modern Arab terrorism), and the United Nations (whose "peacekeeping" forces strand by and watch while innocents are slaughtered in the Congo instead of protecting the helpless). The Prize has turned into a beatification of those who stand opposed to Western values, fellow travellers, sanctimonious poseurs and the clueless.

Now Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with "alerting" the world to the dangers of man made global warming. Discounting the fact that the truth of Gore's version of the causes of global warming is in dispute among respected scientists, one wonders what Mr. Gore has done to promote peace in the world with his alarms. The only thing that we at the Manor can assume is that it is Mr. Gore's insistence on bringing down Western technology and engineering to the level of the Third World so that instead of burning fossil fuels or taking advantage of the power of the atom the First World can burn dung to make our morning coffee and move our cargo over the roads with heavy duty bicycles and over the seas with sailing ships. Meanwhile, Mr. Gore flits from place to place like a moth with some sort of attention disorder in private jets using the excuse that he's buying carbon offsets by paying someone to plant a tree for each mile he travels, or some such nonsensical thing.

And here's where the awarding of the Prize makes some sort of sense. The Nobel Peace Prize has become a prize given by the elite to the elite. The people doing the grunt work to make the world a better place are looked down upon. The Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, Chabad, medical missionaries and teaching missionaries do more to promote peace in nations and in the world than Mr. Gore. But because none of these groups buy into the New Age liberal Gaia nonsense, they are ignored in favor of a self satisfied re-incarnation of the Penguin.

But what can you expect from Sweden? The Swedes sat out World War 2 while others bled so the Swedes could make their name in the manufacture of uncomfortable furniture.

But others, much smarter and more articulate than your correspondent, have addressed the matter more succinctly. Check them out: Public Secrets: from the files of the Irishspy: And the award for the biggest , Union Leader - Gore's prize: A fraud on the people - Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007 .