What Does A Man Do?
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What Does A Man Do?
by Zack Budryk
You are not supposed to exist passively as a man under American capitalism. To fulfill your duties, you must be constantly thinking of how to become more of a man. Ideally that means buying products or subscribing to political ideologies that conveniently advance and expand your manliness. (This is true of being a woman too, of course, but better-qualified people have already written thoughtfully on that.)
For all the things masculinity has claimed to mean over the years, one of its most consistent themes is that a man is supposed to fucking do something in a crisis.
For a while, war was a great way to accomplish this, to become more of a man. It wasn’t always like this though. For centuries, war was so commonplace that for billions of men, it was just something you got roped into at some point. That changed when the US entered World War I, and early mass media made contact with a nation concerned that it had been neutered by industrialization and urbanization.
“Make your daddy glad to have had such a lad/Tell your sweetheart not to pine/To be proud her boy's in line,” the vaudeville composer George M. Cohan wrote in his hit song “Over There.”
Decades later, the man of the 1970s – the dutiful man who eagerly awaited instructions about how to become more of one – was receiving the flack of emasculation from all sides. There was a loss in a Cold War proxy war abroad, the rise of second-wave feminism at home, and a culture increasingly dominated by styles like disco that elevated queer men and, perhaps even worse, straight men who didn’t care if their style and affect seemed queer.
The man who did something in this era, then, was a soldier in his own land, a man empowered to wantonly kill the bad guys without being a common murderer. Often, he started out emasculated, like the protagonist of Kenny Rogers’ “Coward of the County,” who learns that pacifism is incompatible with a world where villains wait in the shadows to gang-rape your sweetheart. (It’s morbid poetry that we recently learned the basis for one of those pop culture phenomena, the hit 1973 film Walking Tall, almost certainly murdered his own wife and blamed his external enemies).
In the modern era, we don’t even call our wars wars anymore, and we’ve gotten more cynical (but still not enough) about the idea that everyone we point our weapons at is a force for ontological evil. The men who do something are once again homefront vigilantes. They can be returning warriors, like Daniel Penny, the marine who strangled a homeless man, beat the rap and was rewarded with a no-show job by a billionaire. Or they can be another unassuming Coward of the County, like Kyle Rittenhouse, a midwestern teenager who took up arms when, in his fans’ telling, the cops refused to.
Both those men are folk heroes on the American right, but this isn’t exclusive to the right by any means. The September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk set off a round of discourse, as political murders do these days, about not just suspect Tyler Robinson’s motivations, but whether sincere opposition to a fascist regime requires violence, and whether it enables fascism to oppose or condemn it. A month out, it’s abundantly clear that whatever you thought of Kirk, his murder has only made things worse for the left, with the Trump regime vowing an even harsher crackdown on speech (and possibly trans people for no reason other than Robinson possibly having had a trans partner, who is accused of no wrongdoing).
But the idea that killing a figure like Kirk is meaningful political action makes perfect sense if you think you’re the main character in a movie, like many a man who does something. It made me think of another figure who took action to accomplish putatively left-wing goals, Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William McKinley.
Or rather, it made me think of a fictionalized version of Czolgosz, depicted in Stephen Sondheim’s 1991 musical Assassins, where he’s depicted as being moved to action by a speech by the iconic anarchist orator Emma Goldman.
“What does a man do when at last he realizes his suffering is caused not by the cruelty of fate but by the injustice of his fellow human beings?” Sondheim’s Goldman thunders. “What does a man do when he sees those dear to him starving, when he himself is starved? What does he do?”
It also made me think of two men who did something in another way, a quieter way distinct from the way men are encouraged to do something, but in a way that mattered more than what Robinson ever will. Not a lot of people outside of Youman Wilder’s life know his name, probably. I had to look it up to write this after seeing headlines about his story. Wilder’s been coaching Little League for 21 years – nearly as long as Tyler Robinson has been alive – and that’s what he did when ICE agents rolled into Harlem this summer. Wilder did something, but he didn’t use his fists or a gun or any sort of offensive weapon. As Wilder told it in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, he heard agents asking the kids about their countries of origin, and those of their parents.
“I just stepped in and said this is very inappropriate to ask these kids anything ... I’m just going to have them implement their Fifth Amendment right, and not say anything to you,” Wilder said. In a separate interview, Wilder said he thought, in regards to his players “I'm willing to die to make sure you get home.” The phrasing is telling – Wilder wasn’t thinking about having to kill, he was thinking about having to die. The noblest calling he could think of was sacrifice, not violence.
Another man told a similar story after ICE descended on a Chicago apartment building in the dead of night, detaining immigrants and citizens alike for hours. I don’t know this man’s name. I’m not supposed to – in interviews, he didn’t give it for his own safety. The man described to WBEZ how he sheltered a Venezuelan neighbor he was friendly with and her seven-year-old daughter, successfully keeping the agency from taking them. “I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he said.
All this is tumbling around in my head shortly after the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a project Anderson worked on for years but which feels hyper-relevant to the current moment with its themes of political violence and resistance to a fascist state. One of the movie’s breakout characters is Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro), a man with no connection to the French 75, its defunct leftist guerilla organization. When he’s introduced, Sergio is seemingly just an easygoing local karate teacher. It’s only when his student Willa’s (Chase Infiniti) father Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) needs to flee that Sergio reveals he has “a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” It’s not just that Sergio is sheltering seemingly dozens of immigrants in his home, it’s that his entire community trusts him implicitly and will aid Bob because Sergio vouches for him.
Sergio isn’t a revolutionary or a desperado, he’s just a chill local guy who, to quote this year’s other great depiction of anti-authoritarian resistance, has friends everywhere. In the context of Andor, of course, the resistance is also armed and violent, but a huge part of their success is the presence of people like Sergio, people beneath suspicion who are there not because they can fight or kill but because they can be trusted. Friends everywhere, as they say.
My grandpa wasn’t a revolutionary either, and I think sometimes that made him feel a little guilty. When I was in high school and my grandparents took my brother and me to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, he lamented the lack of anyone who spoke out or stood up against the Nazi regime, but expressed doubts he himself would have had the courage to. He also once mentioned to me that his namesake, Peter, is most famous for choking in the most important moment of his life. I once heard a priest say Peter’s failure was that he was willing to kill for Christ, but not to die for Him – the inverse of Youman Wilder.
After my grandpa died last November at 87, his memorial service was full of friends and family, but it was also full of people I’d never met, people he met through the Upward Bound program and the wilderness course he founded within it. My grandpa, I learned, hired predominantly Black instructors in an era where that was unheard of – and I’d never known, largely because he would never brag about something like that, he just did it.
So as the nights grow longer and new horrors crowd the news and sometimes it’s easy to think the sun will never rise, I’m still reflexively wondering, as white noise, how to be more of a man. I suppose I could learn martial arts or how to shoot. Or maybe, if I care about what I do more than what I’m seen doing, I could try to be more like Youman Wilder or Sensei Sergio or my grandpa. Maybe when the shit hits the fan, people need someone they can trust more than someone who does something.
Zack Budryk is a DC-area journalist and writer. His reporting and commentary have appeared in The Hill, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue and The Nation and his fiction has been published in Rock and a Hard Place Magazine.
