The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Read online

  And how old is old? How big is big? Where do you draw the line as far as which tree to protect and which goes into my next roll of double-quilted, extra-soft TP? How tall? Fifty Feet? Sixty? Eighty? And how old? A hundred years? A hundred and twenty-five? A hundred and fifty? What qualifies as salvation worthy? You’ll sit there in the leaf litter, tearfully bemoaning this poor “elder” as the chain saws get fired up, as long as someone is paying attention to you. But you haven’t sent your own grandmother a Christmas card in eleven years. You’ll chain yourself to an old-growth redwood as long as a guy with a camera from CNN or the Discovery Channel shows up, but you won’t volunteer at an old-age home or a homeless shelter.

  See, it’s not about the rhinos, or the whales, or the trees.

  It’s …

  about …

  you.

  The constant in any radical ecological movement is not a concern for nature. It is a humongous, overarching narcissism. It is the belief in, and subsequent practice of, a form of enlightened fascism, a sense of entitlement, and a kind of conservationist noblesse oblige that dictates that attention be paid to you, and what you believe, and what you want. And, quite frankly, I don’t care about you, or what you think should be done about any particular animal or plant. And raving at me about it, and making an ass out of yourself to get my attention or the attention of a very busy world, does not improve matters, and it does nothing for the species you claim to care for.

  Stop crying, Jungle Boy. Some truths are hard to take. Sorry I roughed you up so bad, but somebody hadda do it.

  Now pick yourself up off my driveway and go wash my truck.

  or you aspiring MMA athletes who want to get into the sport to score chicks like mad, let me spare you some pain: most fighters are never recognized in public. Recognized as children left behind, maybe, but not in the way that will get you an adorably polite Asian giggling while she covers her mouth and flashes you a peace sign. From time to time, passing strangers even throw spare change into my teammates’ coffee cups as they lean against a building looking like the homeless bums they could easily be.

  If you want a job that will get you major fan recognition everywhere you go, do not become a fighter. Write that down. Now read what you just wrote: do not become a fighter. If you ignore my advice, your dream of being mobbed by beautiful women will not come true. In addition, you might as well tattoo “Don’t Hire Me” on your forehead because if you follow your half-baked ambition you will end up looking like a skydiver who packed a lunch instead of his parachute. Don’t believe me? Then listen to this.

  C.B. Dollaway, an Ultimate Fighter alumnus and fellow decorated Division I wrestler, went to a Kanye West after party (don’t ask me why). A gorgeous lady strutted up to his table. She was almost comically tall, blond, curvier than a racetrack, and—gosh, how do I say this in a gentlemanly fashion?—rather robustly chested. She said to C.B., “Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like Matt Damon?”

  True, C.B. Dollaway does look like Matt Damon—like a Matt Damon who had the stuffing beat out of him, that is. I know it annoys C.B when someone mentions it, but when the one who makes such a remark is hot, the hotness dulls a lot of that annoyance. So he smiled and fished for a compliment by saying, “Thanks, most people say that I look like C.B. Dollaway.”

  You trolling bastard.

  I officially love this girl, because she actually knew who C.B. Dollaway was and she didn’t recognize him. In fact, she started making jokes about how no one knew who the heck he was (even though his season of The Ultimate Fighter had just aired). C.B. let her dig her own grave for a while, and then he leaned in and shouted, “I am C.B. Dollaway!”

  Apparently (I wasn’t there because I wouldn’t be caught dead at a Kanye West after party, let alone his concert), the color drained from her face and then she left a girl-shaped cloud of dust as she hauled her shapely ass out of the club. So, let this story be a lesson to you. C.B. Dollaway is a decent fighter who had a good run on a television show watched by literally millions, and even he isn’t recognized by hot girls. Imagine how mediocre fighters feel on a daily basis. Worse, think about how you would feel. If you get into the sport for the love of fighting, all the power to you. If you get into it for hot chicks, I hope you will be OK dating Rosie and her five sisters.

  BFFs

  n many ways, my job is just like your job (unless you are a horse-reproductive specialist, in which case my job is nothing like your job; the only similarity being that we both wear gloves). To get ahead in my job, I compete against my coworkers. That championship belt isn’t just a trophy. It’s my corner office. My promotion. My Employee of the Month plaque. And once I have it, I’m chased down by all of those ambitious snots who think they can do better. But just because there is competition involved in the job doesn’t mean I can’t be friends with my coworkers. We can hang out, grab a bite to eat, talk about our days. And when promotion time comes around, we all fight to better our situations. My coworkers and I probably won’t be best chums during the free-for-all, but once a winner is declared, we can resume our water-cooler gossip. This is a normal part of all work environments. This is healthy.

  With that said, I have to mention just how much it irritates me when a fighter refuses to compete against someone because “he’s my friend.” Have you ever heard of a professional football or basketball player sitting out a game because a friend of his was on the opposite team? No.

  Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva are systematically ruining MMA by trying to make it into a diplomatic mission with four-ounce gloves. It’s a sport, a game, amigos, and you two dancing macacos aren’t princes with peace treaties. Did you ever notice that Anderson dips a toe into the light heavyweight division only here and there? Anderson chooses to hide by emaciating himself. Have you seen that guy on weigh-in night? He looks like a terminal patient, or the victim of some Dickensian illness—like Tiny Tim grew up and traded his crutchs for four-ounce gloves. I keep expecting that Santa Clause look-alike to walk into frame, take Joe Rogan’s microphone, and start talking about how little it would cost to send Anderson to school. For the price of one cup of coffee a day, you can make sure this Brazilian gets enough to eat, and all that. Then you remember that what Anderson is doing is not only self-inflicted, but is just a means of avoiding being punched in the face by his best friend. I say that if you can’t take a solid right from a person you trust, you have no right to fight a stranger.

  In most sports, you expect to be on different teams during your lifetime, but in fighting your team is not your gym. Your team is your weight class. That means that we must expect to fight our own teammates over the course of our careers. That’s the job, so if you sign up for it, deal with it. If you and your sister-for-life decide to throw a press conference to show off your best-friends-forever collage and your shiny new matching necklaces, maybe you need to rethink your career aspirations. Pinkie swears are bad for sports, kids. Swearing off competition against friends is just making athletes weaker, less entertaining, and less distinctive. I don’t know—maybe Anderson isn’t as hungry as he looks.

  While Anderson is an easy target, there are plenty of fighters who are very quietly making these nonviolence pacts with one another. Why is this even tolerated in MMA? What are these fighters afraid of? I’ll tell you: They’re afraid of going up against the people who know their tricks better than anyone else. For the average fighter, it is scary to think of facing the person who has seen you train, who has experienced your strengths and weaknesses firsthand, and has seen exactly how their own training stacks up against yours. What’s a fighter to do when he can’t hide behind what his opponent doesn’t know? You won’t know what kind of person you are if you duck the people who are most likely to beat you. And you’re certainly not a fighter.

  very rock of wisdom added to the human race’s collective hoard eventually gets another rock placed on top of it. As a result, the knowledge that we have now is better than what came before it. Jets are better than bipl
anes. Cars are better than horse-drawn carriages. Vaccinations are better than polio. Catch my drift? The people who get all crazy about the past—you know the types, the ones who go to Renaissance fairs in cloaks and tights, those crazy hipsters who run around dressed like the cast of Mad Men, and don’t get me started about people who collect antiques—are delusional.

  Do you yearn for the days when letters were handwritten? Do you wish you could go a few rounds with Hemingway (boxing or booze, take your pick)? Give me a break. Even Hemingway wishes he lived here and now.

  Knowledge is acquired and honed, and when you really get down to brass tacks, it saves us a lot of time. Why make so many mistakes of our own when we can take this gift from father knowledge. Do we have to eat uranium and punch a lion and move to Brazil to know that they are all horrible ideas? People before us learned how to make bread, forge tools, tame animals, and get girls so we could just sit back and take advantage of the fruits of their trials and errors. What a wonderful world.

  With all that in mind, when someone mentions the word “ancient,” the first thought that crosses your mind should be, “Not as good.” Sure, tradition can be nice and comforting, but at a certain point it holds us back from being better, smarter, more impressive versions of ourselves. Case in point: fighters who think they are part of some centuries-old martial legacy. I have a long list of grievances with anyone who fights just because he feels like he’s an extension of some ancient order. I’m going to spare you my thoughts on religion for the moment, mostly because I just don’t have the time to open that jar of pickled-pygmy-chimp fingers, but I’ll just say that the wackos who treat martial arts like some sort of religion have, with a few very key exceptions to the rule, not achieved any level of enlightenment just because they can kick or punch a guy good. I hear that Steven Seagal is a holy man in some culture or another. Holy according to whom? Maybe the word for holy was confused with “I recognize you because the VHS of Under Seige 2 is the only tape I have in this mosquito-plagued scab of jungle that I call home.”

  Most true athletes in the world, no matter the sport they play, will not act all pompous about the roots of their sport or claim to be more pious because they climbed a grassy knoll for some fresh air and a toke and found themselves in a meditation-cum-fighting salon with Bodhidharma and Musashi. True, most sports are pretty modern, but I don’t see track-and-field stars mouthing off about their Greek forebears running around naked back in the day. You certainly don’t see wrestlers embracing the roots of their sport by wearing togas and laurel-leaf wreaths around their heads, not to mention doing other stuff that spawned prison-time behavior.

  So if the rest of the athletic world can stop with the high-handed speeches about their roots and the bratty behavior along with it, why do some fighters feel the need to swagger around and brag about being a member of an “elite, time-honored tradition.” Fighting isn’t about honor, and it sure as hell isn’t about integrity. If we’re talking about “the old days,” as these rat bastards so often like to do, then what fighting really was about was either “you have something I want” and “I don’t want to give you the something you want” or “I disagree with you, I am a king, and I have more disposable peasants than you do.” Where is the honor and integrity in that? The only people who benefit from fighting are the fighters themselves, or the kings who get the spoils, making fighters the most selfish people on the planet and our job the most appalling in the universe. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not just selfish but unbelievably ignorant.

  Look, any kind of fighting is brutal unless you throw in some dance moves and dress it up in pretty-colored sashes. Then you have Capoeira, which is about as effective as using lambs to stop a missile. Also, I am not keen on the term “martial arts.” When I think of art, I think of Bob Ross—that guy on PBS who tried to teach you how to paint a tree—and a fat opera singer with a Viking helmet. Though to be fair, I bet Bob could’ve whipped the snot out of any strip-mall karate student while simultaneously dabbing some shrubbery next to those white porch steps because what person in his right mind would have a white porch with no shrubbery? It’s ludicrous.

  Just say “fighting,” which is a science and a crude (but seriously fun and far more enjoyable) form of diplomacy. The people who get really insistent about calling it an “art” secretly want to be poets, and probably spent their lonely nights in bed writing haikus about clouds and leaves. News flash, Matsuo-san. Musashi became an artist only once he ran out of worthy opponents to whoop.

  So martial arts are “time honored” and “ancient”? That’s rich. It’s a nice way of saying that something is dead and obsolete. If time-honored traditions were still so important to the modern world, we’d all still be taking trains and going crazy from syphilis. Stop pretending that you’re tapping into some kind of ancient wisdom. Do you want honor and integrity? Go build a homeless shelter. Go keep a senior citizen company. DO something, because fighting sure as hell isn’t doing anything. Look at Brian Stann: that guy fought a war, built a nonprofit organization, and can whip your ass, all while not being a jerk about it. That’s a true fighter. In fact, Brian Stann has a distinction that only five or so fighters get to boast: he is a real fighter and a real man. What a rare combination, one that is never found in the same room as a gi. For those of you too busy talking about your roots, I suggest you take your pajamas, your rainbow sashes, and your dried herbal tonics to some stone monastery while the rest of us enjoy our penicillin, indoor plumbing, and the real fruits of ancient knowledge.

  On Today’s Menu:

  Sacred Cow

  an’t tell you how many discussions I’ve had with people, and how many articles I’ve read, about great films. The two films that are always discussed in a hushed, reverential tone are The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. Let me make something clear: People discuss these films like they are brilliant works of art for much the same reason that people fall over when they get shot—because culture instructs them to.

  Let’s get the physics of the gunshot thing out of the way first. If you get shot, and the bullet has enough energy to knock you down, it should also knock down the person firing the gun. This is simple Newtonian physics and has been proved beyond doubt. Of course you have to take into account the instances when the bullet causes instant death, resulting in a lack of muscle control and inevitable collapse. You also need to account for instances when the individual being shot is off-balance or otherwise physically compromised from maintaining verticality, allowing the relatively mild nudge of a small lead projectile to affect his status. When such scenarios are removed from the equation, studies have shown that people fall down when they get shot because it seems like the right thing to do.

  Why? Because films and television shows have instructed them that this is the correct and justified reaction. And so they fulfill their contract with their instructors by behaving accordingly. In most cases people function better, and stay vertical a lot longer, when they don’t know that they’ve been shot. It happens in firefights and shootouts all the time. Just ask some of your cop or veteran friends.

  Similarly, the culture of film critics and film buffs have anointed The Godfather movies (I and II)* with a status that far outstrips their genuine artistic value. They’re not awful; there’s some decent acting by Duvall and Cazale, but these performances are eclipsed by the unfathomable, self-reverential, slovenly, baffling performance by Brando, the usual bag-of-tricks mugging by De Niro, the stone-faced, self-impressed faux-portentousness/eye-rolling volcanic eruptions of Pacino, the high-school-play-level, off-the-wall antics of Caan, and the absolutely atrocious, mannered, stylized, vomit-inducing hamfest that is Lee Strasberg’s “performance” as Hyman Roth. The movie is lit OK in some scenes, but in others it appears to be working way too hard to brood. It’s obvious that the director was trying to imbue the characters with weight and meaning by hiding them in the murkiness of poorly-lit rooms, hallways, and garages, but this attempt at “mood” fails, since the character
s, a bunch of bumbling half-wits, don’t have the weight of character to make themselves worthy of our respect, or their own dignity. As a result, their semi-concealment in the shadows does not lend them, or their actions, any gravitas. It simply makes it appear as though the mighty Corleone crime family has taken a bit of a downturn and had their electricity turned off by the power company.

  I know. I can hear you howling already. I could keep this up all day, but instead I’ll just point out a few things to think about:

  1 Why does a crime family of such might, weight, and ferocity send one old man (Luca Brasi) to a Mafia sitdown with no backup whatsoever?

  Granted, he was the most fearsome murder-machine the Corleone klutzes could cobble together to send into battle, but still, why was he there all by his lonesome? After he spends a few seconds trying to act tough, one guy stabs him in the hand with a knife while another strangles him to death with a piano cord. It takes all but twenty seconds to end his life. Seriously, I’ve had a harder time killing a squirrel in my attic.

  2 Why was Fredo assigned to protect the Don out in the street by himself, during a gang war no less?

  Who was giving out the assignments that day? “OK, we gotta protect the boss. Fredo, you’re incompetent, an idiot, and a bumbling coward. You got this?”