Me and . . . Mr. T

We did not have a thing going on

When I was writing the subhead for the previous column, “I was angry enough after seven rounds of buffering,” I mistyped. G is close to F on the keyboard, so I almost sent a subhead that said I’d had seven rounds of buggering. Hmm. What is the word’s origin?

Middle English (originally denoting a heretic, specifically an Albigensian): from Middle Dutch, from Old French bougre ‘heretic’

“Specifically a Albigensian” is my favorite clarification of the week so far.

A big chunk I took out because it stood in the way of everything else, even though I wanted to say it.

Before the Tyson fight, women’s boxing. I did not watch it, because I have an instinctive revulsion to the sight of physically abused women, regardless who’s dishing it out. Women hitting each other before exultant multitudes does not seem like a necessary and salutary addition to the culture.

Well how is it different from when men do it?

Are you serious? Okay, I’m going to clamber out on this thin limb, bending with the weight of my ossified prejudices, and say it’s different because they’re men. Boxing is the essence of conflict, stripped of tools, the end result of a male brain that has been sloshing around for millennia in a boiling vat of testosterone, and it is also an expression of the the long, long process of civilizing us and channeling our brutish natures into productive pursuits, while carving out a sport that combines skill and brutality into tidy, discrete time periods with ironclad rules such as “thou shalt not strike the testes” and such. Utter barbarism,  except a thin guy in a bow tie can step in and make them stop.

That about sums it up, so I’ve nothing to add - except I rarely watch boxing these days, regardless of which sex is battering which. I don’t seek it out. I don’t keep up on it. I wouldn’t notice if it went away. It was different in the 80s, though. You couldn’t help but hear about it, because boxers had a higher celebrity profile. They ranged from charismatic fellows like Sugar Ray Leonard, to dead-eyed sharks from the deep, like Roberto Duran. The Rocky vibe was a rah-rah America story, after all. Just like Rambo! Another American hero!

Except . . . well, you know the story. Rambo did not begin as a rah-rah tale. Rocky was a hard-luck story of a guy in a lousy economy in a decaying city that wasn’t coming back. (See also, Saturday Night Fever.) Then Hollywood runs the stories through the Sequel Generator, and the unpleasant parts are chemically extracted, distilled, bottled, and given free to indie filmmakers.