Guns, Balls, & Love — part 4

I wrote these essays in order to examine certain violent events in the lives of my progenitors, William Verner and Charles Verner — and in my own life as well — through the perspective of masculinity. I am attempting to understand better what it means to be a man. Often, that understanding comes through the roles we fulfill in our lives: father, husband, partner. Sadly, in my own assessment, I have ultimately failed in all of those roles in that I have been unable to sustain them over time.

I consider myself lucky for the sheer abundance of relationship opportunities I’ve been afforded, in the form of marriages and otherwise. However, none of them has lasted. I find myself closing up, closing off — like the slowly constricting aperture of camera lens — before ultimately abandoning the relationship altogether. Now, in middle-age, looking back, that pattern feels like a different, more subtle form of violence. One that I can only try to examine more closely if I have any hope of changing it. But it’s a hard exercise to undertake, and one that is freighted with shame.

It’s difficult (if not impossible) to argue that we don’t have violence hard-wired into us a species, I just wonder how much we acknowledge that in our day-to-day lives.

The #metoo and #timesup movements are shining a light on something that has been an open secret for as long as there have been humans: men treat women in cruel and horrific ways. There are many of these types of open secrets creeping back into our public discourse, lately: The history and ongoing presence of racism in this country. The prevalence of police brutality, especially against people of color. The proliferation of guns and the near-mania of gun ownership.

Violence is entwined with all of these like muscle is entwined with bone. It is the dark dynamism that turns extreme thoughts into extreme actions. And men are often at the center of these actions. I tried to add some small amount of levity (crude, I’ll admit) to my running title for these pieces, and yes, I talk about football and about the musket ball which broke my great, great grandfather’s jaw, but those aren’t the balls I’m referring to, right? Maleness, in and of itself, being in possession of testes, feels like the most overtly violent characteristic of all. To be a man is to be the personification of our long, bloody history as a species. Even colloquially, to be said to “have balls” is an acknowledgment of someone’s aggression, contrariness, or flat-out disregard for civilized norms.

Having served in the Marine Corps, I’ve seen the rituals we subject our young men to in order to instill an even more heightened form of masculinity in them, a masculinity that must fortify them enough to enter into chaotic situations under threat of injury, psychological stress, or death and exert their dominance, nonetheless. (I’m sure police training reflects the same kind of mindset.) I started this series of essays with my recollections of the pugil stick challenge which was the culmination of my Marine Corps boot camp experience. Over the course of that three-month training, I had several sessions on how to physically deal with a hostile enemy (i.e., dude) coming at me with not-nice intentions. As it happens, I have never had to use that training in a “real life” situation; I’ve never had to face down the threat of assault from another man, either armed or unarmed. (How many women can say the same?)

In addition, it is worth noting that I am writing over a century-and-a-half after my great, great, grandfather’s injury in the Civil War, and just shy of 100 years after the bloody events on my great grandfather’s farm back in 1912. I am looking at violence through the lens of 21st century America.

The story of Charles Verner and his murder-suicide rampage is a tragic one, of course. It is gripping, especially to me and my family because of its direct connection to our lives. At the time of its occurrence, as evidenced by the colorful newspaper depictions, it was no doubt shocking. But by modern-day standards, it is — I’m sad to say — somewhat tame.

From the time that William Verner worked his farm up through today as I type on the keys on my computer, “true crime” has evolved in America. From the occasional bloody but compelling news story, to a slightly seedy subcategory collected by hobbyists, to a lurid and lucrative form of underground entertainment, to a full-blown, fully-formed genre with its own strong current within the sea of popular entertainment. We have collectively opened our eyes to the ever-broadening spectrum of human perversion and psychopathy. From H. H. Holmes to Ed Gein to John Wayne Gacy to Jeffrey Dahmer to the Golden State Killer and beyond.

Skin suits, cannibalism, and clowns, oh my.

Our cultural appetite for violence has grown so rapacious, how can we be surprised by what has risen up to feed it?

I loved playing football as a kid. As I stated earlier, I viewed it as a gloriously all-out form of physical play. But I cringe at the damage we are doing to our players in the NFL. Of course it makes sense that if someone routinely knocks his brain around within his skull, it is going to become damaged. If that damage causes a player to become suicidal, and he acts upon that despair, the violence ripples outward, off the field, into that player’s family, becomes inflicted upon his loved ones. American football has become the gladiatorial coliseum of our times, we sacrifice our most gifted physical specimens (more slowly than in olden days, over a longer span of time…but still) for the entertainment of the masses.

And witness Colin Kaepernick, who attempted to use the power of that national stage to call attention to the treatment of African Americans at the hands of the police. Outrage! Opprobrium! How dare he divert attention away from the violence perpetrated by a multi-million dollar sports league for our fanatical entertainment to the violence perpetrated by our law enforcement officers against our young black men! Because he chose to make his protest during our National Anthem, it provided an easy point of deflection for the jingoists, reactionary nationalists, and racists (including our President). Unpatriotic! Traitorous! Police officers are killing unarmed young black men, and it is unpatriotic for a black NFL player to take a knee (perhaps the most benign of all possible protest gestures) in order to bring attention to the issue? For me, this is just one of the many times in recent memory where our collective culture crossed fully into the realm of the absurd.

Perhaps another is the secondary form of NFL violence perpetrated against women in the form of cheerleaders. No, they aren’t pummeled on the field, but don’t the physical and behavioral standards to which they are held smack of domination and degradation? Ultimately, whose idea was it to have scantily clad ladies gyrating on the sidelines in the first place? Who does it serve? (Psst. Here’s a hint: they have balls.)

I also have served in our military forces (two different branches, actually, but that’s a different essay). Which means I have fired a weapon. I was always especially good at firing a rifle, earning expert marksmanship ratings in both of my stints of duty. But it wasn’t until I got the chance to fire a 50mm machine gun and observed, first-hand, the destructive capability of that weapon — you’ve seen those time lapse films of a dandelion blossoming open in the blink of an eye? Imagine the center of a 6 foot square target being vaporized into a cloud of confetti in about the same amount of time — that I truly felt a primal repulsion at our capacity to engineer death. As Lynyrd Skynyrd sang to the snub-nosed, eponymous pistol in their tune Mr. Saturday Night Special: “You ain’t good for nothin’ / But put a man six feet in hole.” I have refused to own a gun since my Marine Corps time.

I’ve never fired a shotgun, so I have no sense-memory input when imagining Charles Verner carrying out his horrific acts. But, not surprisingly, guns are the preferred method of choice for suicide by a wide margin; and in 2016 fully 70% of suicides were committed by white men, and the rate of suicide is highest in middle age (per the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention website). Sadly, as a white, middle-aged man, I can say that I have been suicidally depressed, and during that time I became obsessed with a make of handgun called the “Judge” which fires either .45 caliber slugs or .410 shot shells. I figured by using shot instead of a bullet, and firing the gun into my own mouth, it would be sure to get the job done quickly and completely (kind of like a mini-shotgun, without the awkwardness of trying to hook a toe on the trigger). Ultimately, a visit to a local gun shop and actually handling the Judge had the same sobering effect as my online search for gunshot wounds to the face; I couldn’t stomach more than a few minutes before beating a hasty retreat.

And witness how common gun violence has become in this country, and how vociferously gun advocates defend their need to own and operate the AR-15, a military grade weapon, which — as pointed out in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song — has one and only one purpose: to kill fast and in quantity.

It occurs to me that many of the threads that I am struggling to pull together and address are captured in far more potent fashion by Childish Gambino in the video “This Is America,” which I saw for the first time recently. If I, as a white man, am struggling to make sense of our society and my place within it, and feel the edges of my sanity fraying at times, how must those who have long been the victims of systemized oppression and cruelty feel?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is Love. As flawed and savage of a species as we are, we also have the ability to love. William Verner, freshly discharged from the Civil War and despite his wounds, physical and mental, found a woman to marry, to bring back to his farm, to bear his children. He had eight years of companionship, and a lifetime of fatherhood. While I can conceptualize the so-called “loveless marriage” and acknowledge that examples of it must exist, I have to believe that there were moments of tenderness between William and his wife. Moments when they held one another with nothing but love in their hearts and devotion shining in their eyes. The man as later described by his son, Arthur, would have been a man capable of gentleness.

Even Charles, as broken as he was to become, was able to win and keep a wife. If the newspaper account of their exchange on the day of their deaths is to be believed, they were willing to show forgiveness toward one another, an arguably tender agreement. Elizabeth, doing the laundry with her young daughter, standing and talking with her husband in the kitchen of their home, obviously had no premonition of the events to come. Though seeking a separation, she must have felt that they were capable of reaching an understanding, right up until the last possible moment. Surely they had shared moments of intimacy and candor? Hadn’t they laughed together over those simple milestones that come in the raising of any child — first steps? first word? those heartfelt embraces that only very small children can give? While I have admitted to sitting in the dark cave of depression, myself, I shudder to imagine the space that Charles occupied at the end, the ghastly version of the upside-down he must have visited which would allow him to turn a shotgun on his wife in full view of one of his children, and then upon himself.

As for me, I have been the recipient of more than my fair share of love. I have known deep, warm, abiding love from a life-long series of gentle, generous women. I have had so many moments of pure joy and contentment. But, like Charles disappearing from his farm in 1899, I always end up making myself absent, either literally or psychologically. That is my manifestation of the violence of being male: inaccessibility, non-reciprocity, callousness. Not physical blows, but psychological ones. Because there is something at my core which believes I am unworthy of Love, and because I find myself rarely capable of loving myself, I am unable to make a place within my heart where the love of another can live and grow. That is a hard admission to make, but I feel it is what these pieces have been leading toward. It is the logical culmination of this examination of my family history. What mistakes have been made? How do we recover? If recovery is not possible, how do we simply survive?

The ongoing discourse about violence in this country, in its many forms, only shows me that many of us are struggling. Far from finding answers, these essays have crystalized just how many questions remain unanswered for me. Who and what are we, at our core? What do our appetites say about us? What do we value, within ourselves and within those closest to us? What are the structures of power we’ve established for the greater good? Who created them, and whom do they serve? Do they function properly? Do they instill trust? When trust has dissolved, what can be done to restore it?

I can only keep looking for solutions within the narrow scope of my personal life. But I take seriously these lessons from my past, as well as the mounting violence manifesting in the present. I’m not a pessimist (believe it or not!), I recognize how far we’ve come and that there are aspects of society in which we have made, and continue to make, great strides. (I’m currently listening to Steven Pinker’s audiobook Enlightenment Now to remind me of those things.) I am trying to overcome my demons, to examine and better understand my failings. These essays are simply part of that process. Thank you for reading them.