EthicalDative

Isabella Rossellini and Friends

I read once somewhere that much of the violence inflicted upon the world is at the hands of young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand.

For some reason the comment comes back to me with a sad ring of truth. Perhaps it’s triggered by the fact that today my son, a highly trained Navy nurse, is being deployed to a war zone.

Too many young men throughout the world are trapped in circumstances which, at a pivotal time in their development — adolescence and early adulthood — give them little or no outlet for the restless energies and ambitions that come awake in those years. Their cultures stifle them with lack of education, lack of careers, and with social and institutional mores that do not facilitate, perhaps even actively discourage, constructive interaction with females.

One-Woman Riot

Such men, in their young prime, stew with impotence, boredom and frustration; they become marks for exploitation by older men of a different sort — ideologues, fanatics, criminals, tyrants, myrmidons. And of course a percentage of the exploited young men turn into the next generation of thugs who exploit… young men.

Woman Conversing With Riot Police

It’s hard to see a way out of the global syndrome of undeclared wars, endemic conflict, and fleeing masses of people unless and until the reactionary, repressive, defensive measures widely resorted to by governing entities give way to attempts, however tentative, to remedy the underlying causes of dysfunction and turmoil at their source. Those causes are tiresomely familiar in the recitations of fools like me: poverty, ignorance, injustice, gender discrimination, greed…. The litany begins to sound almost biblical.

Close Encounter.

I resist most impulses to use my little blog for venting about inconvenient perceptions that don’t obviously correlate to art or language. I lost this particular skirmish with myself, but I’ll carry on the fight to say mostly nice things here and save despair for my pillow.

Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.

Juan Rulfo, Campesinas de Oaxaca, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/four-photographs-rulfo/

Guillermo Chapa was a member of the culture I was assigned to teach Spanish at as a rookie assistant-prof at Pan Am-Brownsville. I said teach “at” instead of “to” because almost all my students already knew the language — I had little to teach them there. The courses I was charged with were abstruse (“comparative-constrastive Spanish-English phonetics and phonology”) and cultural. I knew a lot about the formalities of Spanish and some of its literature. Guillermo knew a lot about the realities of being Hispanic in Texas. We hit it off.

I went with Guillermo and his friends to see a Mexican movie across the border in Matamoros. I can’t remember the title. At one point the screen filled with quietly intimidating men exhibiting distinctly Native-American gravitas and wearing imposing hats. “There they are,” I heard Guillermo murmur reverently, “Los meros meros.”

The Mexicanism and how he said it stayed with me: “Los meros meros.” Without delving too deeply I took it then and take it now to mean something like: The men you don’t want to mess with, who will remain dormant and benign until and unless their community needs them; the backbone of their society, rooted in Pre-Columbian times, icons of long-suffering durability.

That’s just an approximation of what the cinematic image and Guillermo’s comment meant for me at the time. The term “mero” is cognate with English “mere,” but the two terms parted company in this Mexican idiom. There’s nothing “mere” about Los Meros.

Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.

Casa Josh

One of our football coaches, a vet in his forties, recounted how his wife ribbed him about being a neat freak. “Your underwear drawer is relentlessly organized, your t-shirts are folded, your Levis are on hangers!” she would exclaim. His reply to her was, “I’m not a neat freak. I’m a Marine.”

Not one to hobnob much with coaching staff, I nevertheless mentally genuflected anew to this man — for his service to country, of course, but in addition for his neatness. I had more in common with him than I realized. I flunked the Army physical because of a heart murmur, so was disqualified from military service. However, I am a neat freak manqué. I express my solidarity with The Few, The Proud: Semper Organized!

Casa Joseph

Casa Daniel

(Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)