Dilly Dilly!

Sir Brad is ready to begin the Pit of Misery tour

Wild Card Weekend was wonderful. It was much too cold to go outside Saturday and Sunday here in Maine, but there were two football games between high-level teams to watch both days. What’s not to like? Next weekend will be similar: two games Saturday — including one with the hometown Patriots at Gillette Stadium — and two more on Sunday. Tremendous athletes at the top of their abilities will compete and I’m a football fan again.

Readers of this column know I’m a political junkie, studying the latest developments for at least two hours every day. I watch Sunday morning political programs on at least two networks, but when afternoon comes I don’t want any more politics. I want to watch football. This season, however, politics creeped into the game during the national anthem and that put a damper on Sunday afternoons for millions of us. It wasn’t good for the teams as they saw lots of empty stadium seats. It wasn’t good for TV networks or the NFL either because they lost viewers. I kept watching Patriots games but some of the shine had gone.

Mainstream media gave national anthem sit-downs and kneel-downs plenty of attention at first. Then it all backfired after President Trump weighed in and accused players of lacking patriotism. Many fans agreed and voted with their feet by staying away from games. They voted with their remotes by refusing to tune in at home on their TVs. Revenue declined. After that, media stopped their political coverage by refusing to film the playing of the national anthem before gametime. Politics went out the exits. Football fields went back to being exclusively athletic arenas and politics didn’t make the playoffs. Hurray for that.

When my family was young there wasn’t time to watch football, but by the Tom Brady era our nest had emptied and suddenly there was time. I could again experience total immersion in a sea of testosterone. Football is a male world and I hadn’t realized how much I missed it. Don’t misunderstand; I love women. I’ve been sleeping next to one for almost forty-seven years. I have a mother, four sisters, three daughters, two granddaughters and love them all. I also spent thirty-six years in education — a female-dominated profession. Even our two family dogs were females. Can I be forgiven if sometimes I prefer the exclusive company of men? Too bad if I can’t.

It’s not just the football that I enjoy. Televised games are full of commercials aimed at men too. They’re mostly ads for pick-up trucks and beer and some are very funny. In one, various people bring gifts of Bud Light beer to a medieval king, who thanks them by saying, “Dilly dilly!” Others present raise their bottles in toast and repeat: “Dilly-dilly!” Then, an unfortunate fellow puts some mead before the king, who is displeased. The king looks at him and says: “Please follow Sir Brad. He is going to give you a private tour of the pit of misery.” As the king’s torturer, Sir Brad, drags the poor guy away, others hold up their beers in toast, chanting: “Pit of misery! Dilly dilly!

The commercial doesn’t sound funny in the least, right? But somehow it is. There’s no explanation beyond that it probably reminds men of ridiculous things they’ve done and laughed about while drinking beer together. It’s 21st century code for, “Eat, drink, and be merry!” It’s completely unserious and beckons others to join the mirth. If “dilly dilly” has any real meaning, nobody can find it.

So what’s the purpose of football? What’s the point of eleven men carrying, throwing, catching, and kicking an oblong piece of inflated leather a hundred yards down a field while eleven other strong, swift men try to stop them? It’s a guy thing, like war without the killing. It satisfies something in the male psyche, but it’s not unrestrained violence. It has rules all participants must obey or be penalized, even ordered to leave the field. Players are judged by their physical ability which is remarkable, their mental acuity under pressure, their teamwork, perseverance, and heart.

And there’s nothing new in all this. The earliest Olympic Games in the 8th century BC were exclusively for men as I learned when visiting the site in 2014. Married women were banned both from competition and from viewing as well, but “maidens” were allowed. Why that distinction was made our guide didn’t say. Perhaps the “maidens” were an ancient equivalent of today’s cheerleaders. Perhaps it was because the men competed while oiled and naked, but then homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece by some accounts. Maybe it was that.

Whatever the reasons for men wishing to spend time away from women once in a while, they go back a long way. It may have become politically incorrect in the 21st century, but it’s not going away.

No Neutral Ground

St. Peter's on Federal Street in Portland

The men were singing, and there were a lot of them. That’s unusual in my experience attending mass at various Catholic Churches in Maine. Most men come to church because their wives pressure them to, I think. If they pray aloud in the pews it’s usually just a murmur. Several men there at St. Peter’s, however, spoke it like they meant it.

Nearby Cathedral

My wife and I have been checking out different parishes around the Portland/South Portland area when we find ourselves down there Sunday mornings and each has its own feel. St. Peter’s is a small church only a couple of blocks from Portland’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the flagship of the Portland Diocese near the bottom of Munjoy Hill. I wondered how it competed - being in the same neighborhood and almost in the shadow of the cathedral.

Churches of many kinds are closing up and being sold in Maine and many other parts of the country. St. John the Evangelist in South Portland closed a few months ago and it’s rumored the building will soon be replaced by a Dunkin Donuts shop. More than a dozen Maine Catholic churches have closed since 2007. In ten years, Maine’s Catholic population has declined from 234,000 to 187,000. So St. Peter’s is an anomaly. It’s self-supporting and the congregation seems to know that if it were not, it would soon follow the fate of the others.

St. Peter's annual Italian street festival

St. Peter’s is a survivor with an enthusiastic choir. It’s filled to capacity on Sunday morning with lots of families - moms, dads, and kids. Many of the singing men had short, military-style haircuts and I wondered if they were off-duty firemen or police. The congregation nearly drowned out the choir. I was one of very few who weren’t singing, having gotten out of the habit long ago. I would be a good singer if it wasn’t for my voice.

A few weeks ago I found myself in conversation with a young man who had been raised in a family that didn’t practice religion at all. He wasn’t atheist, but was suspicious of organized religion, especially the one I belonged to - Roman Catholic - the oldest, continuously-functioning institution on earth. He was especially skeptical after the homosexual-priest scandal of the late 20th century. That had knocked me for loop too, and I’ve only recently begun putting it into perspective as another way the Catholic Church has been corrupted in its long history - and from which it must purge itself.

American Catholic Church influence seems to have peaked in the late 1950s or early 60s and it’s been in decline since. I don’t know if we’ve reached bottom yet, but I hope so. My home church, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s in Fryeburg, has had several different priests assigned to it in recent years. At least once, none was available for Sunday mass and a communion service had to suffice. It’s part of a “cluster” of parishes because there just aren’t enough priests for each parish to have its own any more. Last summer two missionary priests from Nigeria were assigned to our Fryeburg-Bridgton-Norway cluster.

Ironic, no? A hundred years ago, the American church sent missionaries to Africa. Now they’re sending them to us. What’s up with that? Why is there such a shortage here and not there? They have more applicants than their seminaries can accommodate. A Dallas Morning News article put it this way: “‘The African church is in touch with the raw elements of humanity: birth, marriage, death, hunger, thirst,’ said Christopher Malloy, an assistant professor of theology at the University of Dallas. ‘For me, in a comfortable house, it's easy to think life is not dramatic. [African priests] bring the message to us with excitement.’”

How did Americans get so bored? All drama, whether in a novel, a movie, or in real life, is a struggle between good and evil. As C. S. Lewis put it: “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Drama plays out everywhere and always, but Americans are increasingly blind to it. It’s unfashionable to acknowledge evil exists. Some of us are afraid even to say “Merry Christmas.” In Africa, though, evil is anything but subtle. Christians are routinely slaughtered by Muslim terrorists in Nigeria, Sudan and lately Egypt and Syria (nearby in Asia). Tribal massacres in the hundreds of thousands are still fresh in Rwandan minds. Evil is difficult to deny in Africa. When a young man joins the seminary there, it’s like volunteering for frontline combat.

Speaking of men strong in their faith, click on the video above (taped last week) and watch them defend a cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina from assault. They locked arms and prayed as crazed, topless feminists spit at them, spray-painted their crotches and faces with swastikas, performed sex acts in front of them, and burned an effigy of Pope Francis I while dancing and shrieking in a bacchanalian “National Women’s Encounter.” It’s an annual event sponsored by the Argentine Department of Culture.

A still from the video above

It’s inspiring to see strong men doing what’s right. There are good signs out there if we look for them.

Whither Men?

My wife is apolitical. That’s good, I suppose, because it’s not a source of conflict. She’s simply not interested in politics, and I’m passionately interested. We seldom discuss it but when we do, she can offer insights I cannot see. Once in a while, I’ll call her into the room when someone is speaking on television. I’ll ask her to watch him or her for a few minutes and then tell me what she thinks. I’m not so interested in her thoughts on what the person is saying as much as what she thinks of the man or woman as a person. That’s one of the things my wife is good at: getting clues about what people are like. Never having seen the person before, she’ll suggest personality traits he or she possesses which later turn out to be right on the money. I’ve learned to trust my wife’s instincts about these things. She’s seldom wrong.

Today’s politics is tomorrow’s history. I watch what’s happening now and study what’s occurred throughout the ages. I want to understand it all. I never will, of course, but I won’t give up trying.

I’m the one who picks the movies we rent from Netflix and they include many documentaries and historical fiction because I’m a history teacher. War movies and westerns don’t interest her, but sometimes she’ll watch a film made from an historical novel if it shows good character development. During battle scenes, she’ll often comment about how brutal men are, saying things like, “They’re the ones who start wars. Women don’t do that.”

She’s right, of course, but it bothers me to hear it. Sometimes I take it personally as a representative of manhood, especially if I identify with the character who is fighting in whatever film we’re watching. I think, what choice does he have? The guy finds himself living in a certain time and place, and circumstances pull him into conflict. He’s faced with choices ranging from bad to worse and does what he thinks is right, or whatever is the least wrong. Most often, a man uses violence after another man or group of men crowd him in some way or threaten his family, or his community, or his way of life, or his principles, and he’s forced to do brutal things. Even if he was a gentle, sensitive person beforehand, the circumstances he must work through change him.

Those are my rationalizations at least. Men are brutal, or at least capable of brutality if it becomes necessary. Maybe it’s testosterone. Maybe it’s that Y chromosome. Maybe there’s something wrong with us. Maybe. It has to be considered. If we believe we evolved into the kind of men we are, should we be trying to evolve into some other form of male human who isn’t as prone to violence? Or would that go against our nature and precipitate even more problems? I see western culture attempting to shift away from a martial approach to aggression and toward a conciliatory one and it makes me uneasy. My instinct tells me, strongly, that this is not the way to be. We don’t need any more metrosexuals. We need more warriors. We need a citizenry which recognizes that our country needs warriors and values them.

For example, I’m seeing more “War is not the answer” bumper stickers. I’d like to ask drivers of cars adorned thus: “What is the question?” For some questions, war is most definitely the answer. If the question is: What should we do about several million Radical Muslims who want to make the world Muslim and force us all to live under Sharia law? My answer is: Are you kidding? What if they’re dying to kill us the way they did on September 11th? My reaction is: Kick Radical Muslim ass. Don’t stop kicking until they surrender unconditionally. Root them out from wherever they’re hiding and kill them. After London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, Gaza, why is anyone still asking the question?

Over Christmas break, I spent time with several young American warriors. They’re former students, sons of friends, and relatives. They know who our enemy is, they know what has to be done, and they’re willing to risk their lives to do it - all for our sake. It troubles me that we’re becoming a country that doesn’t appreciate them enough. A majority of Americans like this just elected a new president who is about to take over as commander-in-chief. He’s a great talker, but talk is cheap. Does he have what it takes to lead these marvelous young men and thousands of others like them? I’m not confident that he does.

Vice president-elect Joe Biden told us Barack Obama will be tested by our enemies in the first six months. I have little doubt about that. Then he said: “[W]e're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right.”

Based on what I’ve heard those two guys say on the campaign trail, I believe him. It hasn’t ever been apparent to me that they’re right, and I don’t really expect that to change, but I’ll wait and see.

Color and Sex

Men are four to ten times more likely to be colorblind than women. Color is important to women. Men don’t generally care about it much unless they’re gay.

When my daughter bought a house last summer, all the women who checked it out said the house was “cute.” Without exception, however, they were appalled with the blue-painted woodwork in the living room and the pink walls in the bathroom. “I can’t live in here until I paint that over,” said my daughter, while the other women nodded gravely. Several volunteered to help put on a new color because it would have been too much to expect any women to exist in the presence of that blue. “Why would anybody do that?” they asked each other, referring to the previous owner’s color selection.

None of the men noticed the paint. None. They looked at the roof, siding, plumbing, wiring, septic system, and boiler. “Nice,” they said. The women didn’t like the yellow paint on the outside either, but the men were unaffected. “What’s wrong with it?” they asked. “It won’t need to be painted again for four or five years.”

“That yellow is icky,” said the women. The men shrugged.

Another woman told me how she saw a beautiful blue in the sky above the ocean one day and tried to capture it with her camera. When she got home and examined it, she was so disappointed, she cried. “You actually cried?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” I said.

Colors are related to creativity,” said my wife. “They affect your mood and women are more attuned to their mood than men are. Color affects mood for everyone, but women are more aware of it.”

That reminded me of something a poet said several years ago contrasting women and men about how they deal with their feelings. Women, he said, have a huge vocabulary to describe how they’re feeling and they tend to discuss it endlessly with each other. Men, however, do not, and if they should be feeling something strongly, they won’t necessarily know what’s going on inside them. It’s as if they turn their eyes backward and look down into their chests, he said. They see a maelstrom of feelings swirling there, but can’t label any of them.

Women have a huge vocabulary for colors too - several dozen at least - whereas most men I know have only six or seven basic words describing color corresponding to the spectrum. Men could talk on and on about the advantages and disadvantages of forced hot air heating systems compared to forced hot water or radiant heat systems. How they feel about them would never come up.

A University of Maryland study discussed how something called the OPN1LW gene for perceiving color resides in the X chromosome. “Because females can have two different versions of this gene, but men can have only one, females may be able to perceive a broader spectrum of colors in the red/orange range. Men and women may be literally seeing the world differently,” said one of the researchers.

It’s not just what they see that makes women different from us. How we process that data is important too. On any given day, men tend to use their heads more than their hearts, so color and mood would not be as significant for them as it would be for women who tend to use their hearts more than their heads. Head and heart are each necessary for an integrated human existence but balancing the two would seem best. Some men and women do this individually, but most of us have to do it in union.

While reading recently, a quote about mood and attitude jumped out at me: “We see the world not as it is. We see it as we are.” Since we’re all different, our existence would be awfully narrow if we didn’t listen to and ponder how people around us see things. I’ve lived long enough and been married long enough to know that men and women do indeed perceive the world differently and only some of that has to do with color. Most of the rest is still a mystery and likely to remain such - for me at least.