Evel Knievel died last Friday. He’s being memorialized on my birthday.
What kind of a world are we bequeathing to the next generation? A world without Evel Knievel, Ronald Reagan, Shelby Foote, Richard Pryor, Milton Berle; the list goes on and on.
What will the next generation of American boys do for fun? They won’t have an Evel Knievel to emulate. The closest thing they have is some effeminate metrosexual doing cheap conjuring on live TV so he can pretend to be attracted to supermodels. Instead of jumping dirt bikes over impossibly high mounds of earth, they’ll lie very still in the bath relaxing their hair and pretending it’s some kind of achievement.
What will the next generation of Americans do when the Martians invade? Instead of a Ronald Reagan saying “I’ve just signed legislation which will outlaw Mars forever. The laser strikes will commence in five minutes.” they’ll have some cream-puff, bureaucratic careerist apologizing to the face-melting legions of Mars claiming we must have caused the problem with our Viking landings, the inclusion of the flag on the lander was an obvious attempt at imperial colonization and we’d very much like to surrender immediately, thank you very much, yes, you may atomize the women and children first before wasting the speech writer and claiming complete blamelessness. If only we’d spent more on the childrenTM!
I miss the magnificent bastards, every one of them. The last link our sissified society had to the heroes of yore. Men like Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was shot in the side before stabbing his assailant to death with a penknife exclaiming, “No damned man kills me and lives!” Or Patrick Cleburne, who proclaimed before the hopeless assault at Franklin, Tennessee, “Well Govan, if we are to die, let us die like men.” Men like the Buffalo Soldiers at San Juan, the 77th Division in the Argonne, the men at Bataan, the men at X-Ray, or the Marines in Fallujah.
Will we still produce men like that when there are no role models left?