The Guerilla Patriarchy

Matriarchy in Harm City?

James,

Recently, the zman, a fellow Baltimore denizen of yours, gave an interview with Kevin Michael Grace which you shared on your site and can be found here.

The following exchange takes place beginning 17:50 (I transcribed this myself, please excuse any errors):

KMG: What do you hear about the matriarchy?

zman: There’s no question, and I think that would never change. I think there is something there that goes back a lot farther than modern history, you talk to people who grew up in Africa, there is a guy on my blog who is originally from Rhodesia, and he will tell you that in SubSaharan Africa, it’s a female dominated society. There is a narrow role for males, but the domestic life, community life is largely dominated by females and I think there is a biological component there, that transcends anything that we are going to do as a society.

Steve Sailer gives an amusing excerpt on behalf of the African matriarchy theory, from the book The Marriage Problem, by James Q Wilson.

Vox Day has expressed similar thoughts, and even your unpaid intern seems to think so.

James, what can you tell us about the life-ways and habits of Baltimore's African diaspora with regard to matriarchy, patriarchy, or some unholy sociological innovation?

-Lynn

White Daddy and His Bitch

Lynn, in Baltimore what you have is not a matriarchy, but a decapitated patriarchy cast aside to permit the mutated matriarchy to interface with the meta-patriarchy: The State, known by blacks as The Man and White Daddy.

Hoodrat mothers cast aside would-be men in order to marry the State and then behave as experimental female-beastmen, brutalizing their boys from the cradle to the jailhouse and allowing both boys and girls under their roof to be raped by male relatives and the sex drones that serve her. It is a nightmare, with neither a functional patriarchy or matriarchy, a broken society. An anthropologist has called this bureaugamy, husbandless women married to the bureaucracy.

But what about the female dominated political machine in black urban centers?

This is simple, black man may not vote, because they are almost all felons, because their mothers raise them in an argumentative and brutal fashion which weirdly requires them to fight the cops as a rite of passage. Even if they were just jaywalking, fighting the cops turns it into a felony. There is hardly any black male vote.

Yesterday, I walked by a welfare queen in a nice neighborhood, standing in the doorway with her black paramour, scolding her two children by different men, one a mulatto and the other an octoroon like her. She beat this five year old boy brutally before me and the assembled neighbors, the child screeching in horror as the powerless black youth she is dating—a third her weight—cringed in the doorway as the boy of another, lighter-skinned man writhed on the porch.

Lynn, this is a mutilated matriarchy running amok as the decapitated patriarchy sits in the gutter. That black stud was cringing—I am guessing—at the memory off his own mother beating him like his giant mistress beat the spawn of a previous drone.

Before going into examples of African patriarchy, let me state why the z man and Vox Day, both brilliant men, cannot understand matriarchy or patriarchy:

They, as is our entire society, are critically emasculated.

Matriarchy and Patriarchy

They and even our anthropologists, generally look at a society as either matriarchal or patriarchal. That is a grave error that disables any understanding of human gender dynamics. This comes from the fount of Western Civilization, the pastoral takeover of agrarian civilization by conquering nomads.

Before describing that, let me back up further.

Patriarchy is a paternal hierarchy, a masculine order.

Matriarchy is a maternal hierarchy, a feminine order.

Any healthy society has within it a functional matriarchy and a functional patriarchy, two humans spheres that interact, ideally in an overlapping fashion, not a clashing fashion and not in a submerging manner.

Traditionally, for hundreds of thousands of years, the matriarchy dominated the camp, the cave, the home and the patriarchy dominated interaction with the natural world and other societies. This is exemplified in Amerindian traditions such as the Iroquois, whose men owned nothing but their weapons and whose women shared political power and owned all household goods.

Back to this later, as this is the crux of the book A Dread Grace, the thesis of which is that shared gender power is the basis for hyper-aggressive war-making men, such as the Spartans, the Zulus, the Iroquois, etc.

Matriarchal Submersion

When one gender sphere is squashed or submerged by the other we have an unhealthy society. In traditional, Middle Sea Based [Roman, Semitic, Hellenic] Societies, where nomad conquerors had completely crushed lesser tribes, the status of free manhood was denied conquered men and they were driven into the household as its close master, now squashing the matriarchy under them as they became hairy women. Upon meeting Western Settlers, Amerindians rarely identified European men as men, but as mutilated women, for they farmed and stayed housebound, not hunting and journeying and raiding, but behaving like native women. In this situation, the civilized woman becomes a slave in the same house that a barbarian woman would have ruled, forcing her man to range far and wide and deal with the world rather than huddle womanlike in his false castle.

Patriarchal Decapitation

Ron West, adopted member of the Blackfeet people, calls his people matriarchal, as that is their anthropological designation and we westerners who labeled them so see and shared power between the matriarchal and patriarchal spheres as matriarchal—or female dominated. In reality, according to Ron’s own history of the tribe, the Blackfeet men were not the slaves and servants of the women, but shared equally the powers of the tribe. Then the whites came and split the chiefs between loyalists and drunken puppets and their Jesuit priests went directly for the women and converted them to Christianity, which was how the Catholics originally converted the Germanic kings, by getting to the queen first, which was allowed, because civilized and monkish men were regarded by both red and white barbarians as “effectively female” and allowed access to the women, who, since they occupied an honored place next to the men, had equal influence, which was enhanced by the fact that the men had been split by drug addiction and venomous diplomacy. Thus the natural men find that half of their number have been seduced by the Whiteman’s drugs, that their women have been seduced by his religion and are separated from the community. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the men now face irrelevance in their manly sphere, for a handful of stone age warriors—even super warriors—cannot fight the machine arm of a million man state and no longer have game to hunt, or the freedom to range widely and are thus left with nothing.

There is essentially no difference in how the Indian or the black man have been emasculated by white civilization. Each Indian tribe had its own story and own masculine death and many have managed a revival, have managed to grab back some ground only to have feminism hit them between the eyes.

Black men were originally set aside as the white slave master bred his woman to produce half-breed slaves. After emancipation it took almost a hundred years before black families really began to form. According to Patrick Buchanan in the 1950s, black families were “more churched” than white. According to Thomas Sowell, black men had significantly closed the income gap between 1954-55.

Then, in 1964, LBJ unleashed a plan to destroy the formed-from-scratch black family by initiating State-to-Mother macro-marriage and casting the black man out of the house he had taken a hundred years to build. The process accelerated demonically due to these factors:

1. Not coming from a western, submerged matriarchy, but from Africa, where the gender spheres tend to coexist at a level of separation most reminiscent of the classical Hellenic household, in which men hardly socialized with their wives, who kept separate quarters, people of predominantly African decent are already predisposed to gender separation. The numerous African men I speak to, speak of brothers, fathers and other men of their tribe or nation, not of their mothers, wives and lovers as emasculated Americans of all colors will speak.

2. Not having fully assimilated to the greater American society, cultural disintegration was more likely under such stress.

3. The civil rights movement largely promoted feminist values in a communistic context and came to favor female leadership. One recent example is of the two black female mayors of Baltimore, who have looked to their presidents as father figures and have been petulantly overruled by their white male governor on crime matters. This fatherless-daughter-as-municipal-executive-worshipful of the federal “White Daddy” [I know black women who even called Obama “White Daddy’] was never better illustrated than when Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was told by Eric Holder of the Justice department to stand the police down and she did, as her male underlings seethed with rage. She was eventually trumped by the Whiteman governor who sent in the national guard. In the end, a female mayor is nothing but a slaughter at big daddy’s knee.

4. The low intelligence and high defiance of black criminal youth ensured that most urban black men would never become voters, causing an unbalance between the patriarchy and the matriarchy in the black population, which, to be clear, does not represent a separated community from the white population, but merely an underclass. The only sense of community in the back population is found I the Guerilla Patriarchy.

Guerilla Patriarchy

The black population has been shattered out of community and into social atomization. If one wonders why blacks, as a rule, are fawned over by globalists and the media, it is because the former black community, rendered now into the black underclass, ordered from raped toddlers and shivering addicts in cardboard boxes at the bottom to rappers and athletes and false-maternal icons like Oprah at the top, was the test project for the mono-cropping of humanity, a racially homogeneous, purely class-based mass of unaligned individuals. You whites should look at black America now for a glimpse into the future that has been planned for you. This is meant to be the fate of all peoples, all races, atomization, the division and conquest of society on a subatomic level.

Blacks in American cities call the federal government and the state and municipal tiers and armies of cops, lawyers, social workers and medical persons who are an ever-present hand of unseen but always-felt power in their daily lives, “The Man,” and “White Daddy,” expressions that hark back to the antebellum plantation and before that the English servant plantation, which was ruled by one man, as one Virginia slave master of 1711 put it, “like a biblical patriarch of old.”

This leaves a deep yearning for a flesh and blood daddy figure in the lives of lonely black women and their children. I have had numerous blacks adopt me as their White Daddy, over a hundred at last count and this is often the social role of the boxing coach in urban environments, a breathing bandage for the fatherless soul.

There is another patriarchy, one that is under our noses, bloodying it all the time but remaining unrecognized due to our abysmal, emasculated ignorance.

This is the Guerilla Patriarchy found in various forms. Always extremely, almost cartoonishly, male-dominated and oriented, the postmodern black-identity street gang is an extreme patriarchy, an ephemeral cipher of a society dedicated to the creation and financing of black men—even at the cost of dying before age 35 as most do. This gang activity, exemplified by The Black Guerilla Family (BGF), the name of the most prominent Baltimore area gang, is an extreme reactionary social symptom one may expect from the body sub-politic that remains after the patriarchal structure of a culture has been decapitated. This dynamic actually informed my writing of Reverent Chandler and Malediction Song. This dynamic, the Guerilla Patriarchy is what The Wolves of Vinland and other such neo-barbarian hyper-masculine groups are practicing, albeit in a more sophisticated if less successful way than the BGF and other black identity gangs.

Note that gangster life is distantly modeled on white, Irish criminality in similar urban centers and that, like the Irish before them, the blacks are penetrating law enforcement as well.

Hallmarks of black identity gangster life include the rejection of ‘Government names” in favor of street-names, including the mother's pathetic attempts to invent an atomized identity for her son by giving him a lisping name of pseudo-Arabic inspiration.

Conclusion

Yes there is a black matriarchy, a malformed social order put in place and utterly beholden to Uncle Sam himself for the purpose of extinguishing and suppressing African-American patriarchy.

As emasculated-in-the-cradle civilized Americans, the z man (who declines to express his counter cultural opinion under his real name) and Vox Day, brilliant men though they may be, look at a society such as the many in Africa, where men and women live gender-based lifeways instead of being two-gender Siamese twins like American married couples, and see in this natural, ages old, universally human separation of gender roles and function as matriarchy, largely because the mutilated remains of America Indian tribes whose patriarchal structure had been negated and superseded by the paternal federal government, labeled such societies matriarchal.

We see also, in nations like Sweden and Germany, where the State has turned to a mothering role, an upwelling of the matriarchal urge to be dominated by a very different person—with the majority of women in such places obviously preferring, based on voting outcomes and behaviors, to be gang raped by foreign men than to be served by domestic men.

Achilles and Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Roland and Beowulf, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, would look today at the postmodern American man, who cares more for the company of his wife than for his fellows as some kind of freak of nature, somehow unable to understand that men and women work best together when they remain different and then come together and join as mates, achieving the overlapping of the divergent spheres of femininity and masculinity.

Both the traditional Western perversion of placing the man in the house as the slave of God [See Leviticus] and lord of the woman and the current practice of making of the man a monster and all things masculine monstrous—unless clothed in the flesh of denatured womanhood, are equally distorting and perverse of the natural order of man and woman, protector and nurturer of what is human.

The black rejection of democracy in favor of strong men in Africa and Haiti and of gang life in America, represents a visceral distrust of democratic politics, as democracy is womanish in all of its squawking aspects, encouraging men to squabble like women and amounting to a popularity contest to determine who gets to aim the Great Gun of State, rather than a trial by danger.

Notes on African Patriarchy

1. African men I speak to almost never speak of the mother or wife without apologizing for rudely inserting a woman into the discussion. Boomy, my cabbie friend, is in charge of checking homework and report cards for his daughter, the wife having no authority here. He and other Nigerian men are very patriarchal in outlook. Mobi regarded his mother and her tribe as unimportant to his formation as a man and resents her Americanized meddling with his daughter.

2. In fractured American and Americanized black populations like Baltimore and Liberia, rape by black men is experienced by over 80% of black females, representing a seething animosity toward the forced false matriarchy of the husbandless mother backed by the meta-patriarchy of the State.

3. African queens were less numerous than European queens, had fewer powers and were less warlike than kings, where European queens were more warlike than their kings. The Queen of Uganda was a gigantic fertility goddess that drank milk all day long and had to be rolled around and bathed by attendants. The explorer John Hanning Speke measured her rear end and thighs like a farm animal with no complaint made by her king or people.

4. The Masai are and were dominated by lion-hunting warriors and their women adore them like kings.

(photo credit: Old East Africa Postcards)

5. The Zulu kings forbade their young men to have intercourse with their wives-to-be until they had fought in a battle.

6. The Haitian slaves that rose up in the wake of the French revolution rejected the Rights of Man and wished to fight under a king. One, Mimeca, dictated a letter to the effect that he was a warrior and had fought under three kings, one of the Congo, one of France and one of Spain, and would not accept a collective notion of rule.

7. The famous Amazons of the West African KINGDOM of Dahomey were 5,000 wives of the king, subject to his patriarchy and bearing his children and otherwise permitted to live as men, shouldering arms in the field on his behalf and taking a wife to care for their household and child. This is, in all aspects, a patriarchal arrangement.

8. The current King of Swaziland has numerous wives at his disgusting disposal—hardly a matriarchal arrangement.

9. Hip Hop, or gangster rap, is a vicious attack on matriarchal notions, a feral, woman-hating reveling in unilateral male dominance, and is the single most influential cultural contribution to American public life made by Americans of African descent.

10. Kangs and Queens is a strong motif in Hip Hop culture. Any man who has bedded black women, as I have, knows that they are slaves to the male penis even more so than the famously slutty white women of the hipster and millennial generations. Once you dick a black woman she is your slave until you cast her off, and then she is your most murderous enemy. Most black women abandon their children for hours on end to be inseminated by random men, but preferably Gangster Kangs and White Daddies: clear patriarchal figures. Most food stamp money spent in Baltimore is dedicated to the feeding of luxury meats to the temporary king in her dubious bed, while her children eat cheap hot dogs and ramen noodles. This is not patriarchy or matriarchy, but a symptom of the grasping grossness of a psychologically mutilated people, attempting to purchase some parody of kingship and queenship—some balanced joining in the shadow of the system that has denatured them so coldly—with the bribe that bought their humanity.

Civilization is Evil.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

A Hoodrat Halloween by James LaFond

Around a Spectral Fire All Hallowed Eve, 2015

At the crossing of two ancient paths three bums of the elder kind sit around a time-painted iron drum burning with a bluish fire, reclining on castoff couches under an inky, starless autumn sky. Where the footpath of hobo kind crosses the railroad tracks that likewise saw the daily passage of relics along its way, three men discuss that most accursed night as it approaches.

Available in paperback.

Retrogenesis by Erique Watson and James LaFond

Many have been the doomsday cults who have wished for a cleansing of Sinful Man from the face of Garden Earth, so that a righteous world might be born anew. Imagine if such a cult found a way to cull humanity in a day?

RetroGenesis: And Morning Came is the story of Mankind’s final day, due to an audio plague engineered by a genius think tank employee thought to be hiding in his mother’s basement with aluminum foil wrapped around his head. This high action thriller follows individuals into a manmade hell on earth:

Donna Herford, office manager,
Archie Jones, handicapped janitor,
Gordon Stamos, crack-head pizza deliveryman,
Annie Lu Privolta, stripper,
I.E.D. Davon, Iraqi veteran,
Simon Durst, ruthless capitalist,
Bill Macy, romantic conservative,
Joseph Lyman, playboy millionaire,
Aaron Isenberg, consultant and
Jenny Jorgenson, atheist

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

A Thousand Years in His Soul: Part One in Two Volumes by James LaFond, The Seers, and The Poets

A Thousand Years in His Soul: Part One, is presented in two volumes, The Seers, and The Poets.

The Seers, Four Aryan Mystics at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

There was a time, between the two Wars of European Suicide, when four men of learning and action maintained a primal view of the world and saw though the veil of politics and the fog of war to the other side, a global world where Man’s golems of politics and ideology would forever separate Man from Woman, Family and Tribe, making of him a new creature, an empty vessel to carry the collective ambition of something lesser than, and at the same time irresistible to, life.

They are: 

Lothrop Stoddard 1883-1950 

Oswald Spengler 1880-1936

Ernst Junger 1895-1998 

Julius Evola 1898-1974

Available in paperback.

The Poets, Five Aryan Mystics at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

This volume is an examination of the select works of five literary figures of the first half of the 20th Century who wrote about alienation from a world that was rapidly outgrowing its traditional foundations and turning upon itself. The author regards these men—some popular in their own time, all now obscured by the postmodern zeitgeist—as counter-culture figures who documented the death of Western Man’s Capacity to Dream. As our politicians and moralists ushered in the Age of The Machine with fanfare and destruction, these men wrote of a fundamentally opposing view, their work cloaked in the armor of fiction. 

They are: 

Jack London 1876-1916 

Edgar Rice Burroughs 1875-1950 

H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937 

Robert E. Howard 1906-1936 

Robinson Jeffers 1887-1962

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

A Sickness of the Heart Q&A: Part 2

A Sickness of the Heart is James LaFond's retelling of Francisco Hernando de Cordoba's expedition to explore the Yucatan Peninsula during the Conquistador Period. See Part 1 of James and Lynn's Q&A.

LL: Last time, you mentioned the 100% casualty rate of the Spaniards on this Entrada, due largely to the arrows used by the Mayans and the poor performance of the Spaniard's mail against them. In addition to these wounds, the Spaniards suffered 30% fatalities and were constantly short of fresh water. You write in response to these circumstances: "Any unit that maintains mobile cohesion after sustaining 100% casualties is either highly trained and seasoned--which this unit was not--or is made up of men of exceptional spirit." What else can you tell us about this spirit? Is this something that can be forged in the battle itself? Is it a product of upbringing, or their Catholic faith? What hope do we have that men will display this spirit in some coming apocalypse?

JL: Modern units are typically rotated out of enemy contact when they hit 30% casualties. Their success I attribute primarily to Cordoba’s heroism. He was not cruel to his men or the enemy and led from the front. He was one of the “good” conquistadors in a crowd where few could be found. This is why I titled the second volume Our Captain, as Diaz, as much as he admired Cortez for his brilliant mind, he loved Cordoba and it shows through in his own rough words.

For this reason, the love of a leader, American—and modernist in general—corporate culture, places the CEO as a sacrificial king at the top of a pyramid and across various industries it is taboo for the management to get their hands dirty leading by example, such as Stevens and Teddy Roosevelt did in spearheading the Panama Canal project. There is no room for leadership in a managed situation in a debt-based society, as every man is a slave.

Lynn, I want you, the readers, to think of their workplace and imagine that every member of the company was somehow stranded on a pirate-infested island during a company cruise. I guarantee you that no member of management of any large company would retain his seat. In fact, the hierarchy would immediately flip.

LL: You mentioned in Part 1, and in the book, that Florida was a disaster zone for the Spanish. The coastal natives were ferocious and the interior is and was an uninhabitable swamp. Have you written anything on this topic that we can look for?

JL: This will be covered in Yellow Negroes and White Indians. Only Soto survived Florida in the Conquistador Age and he had the equivalent of a Marine Expeditionary force, an actual main force battle unit by European standards that could have taken its place in the lineup 100 years later in the 30 Years War and done well. And again, Soto, evil though he was, was a hero, a man who led from the front.

LL: The Governor of Cassavaland includes some notes on the use of cassava as a food staple. This is not a question, I just want to brag that I can make the tasty cheese bread that is common in some parts of South America. The main ingredient is tapioca starch, which comes from cassava. It is only really good fresh, otherwise I would mail you some.

JL: I’ll eat it stale, Lynn, so mail it. Soto’s men ate stale cassava bread in North America.

LL: I'll quote from your review of Buddy Levy's Conquistador in the Appendices: "There has never been a question in my mind that the meeting of Europeans and Native Americans after a 14,000 year separation is about as close as we have gotten on this planet to an alien invasion." James, I have thought a lot about this as well, and I have come to view it as Mother Nature's sickest long form practical joke (I have a cynical view of nature and the environment, like others have towards organized religion). This joke did not merely target Homo Sapiens, I have learned recently that North America is being colonized by an Asian ladybug, very difficult to tell from a North American ladybug, that bites! One of the sweetest, most harmless insects of our childhoods is being out-competed by its more ruthless Asian cousin. This holds across animal species and plants as well, when Asian or European counterparts show up, the clock starts ticking for the American version.

Ok, that wasn't a question either. The Appendices are an extensive part of this book, they comprise James's reviews of sources and relevant references used in A Sickness of the Heart and will surely add a volume or two to everyone's ever expanding reading lists. James, you mention the Spaniards use of dogs to hunt men with, and even the use of other men as human blood hounds. You made good use of these ideas in Reverent Chandler. Have you used these elements in any of your other fiction works?

JL: In the Sunset Saga, there is a Character named Bruco, a Canary Islander from the Isle of Gomera. He is named after a real Gomeran chief. The Gomeran’s were used to defeat the natives on the Island of Palms, Fire Island and Grand Island. The two easy lowland islands fell to the French, Italians and Spanish, but nobody could break the tribesmen on the big islands. You actually had big men with sticks beating the shit out of knights and musketeers for a century.

Living across 20 miles of deep ocean from Fire Island was Exile Island, Gomera, where outcast men were made to swim to with their tongues slit so they could not speak. This is the root of the whistling system they used. This was a real bad idea and put natural selection into play in a karmic way as these guys swam back and forth abducting wives and then towing the women 20 miles through open ocean—this is a channel, not a lagoon.

They swam this channel and came back with a babe:

(Image from travel site orangesmile.com of La Gomera.)

The Spanish were trading with the Gomerans for water rights when they found out that these super, super-warriors wanted to get to their enemies and it was all downhill from there. This is how the Spaniards learned how to hunt men, with Gomeran scouts, modifying a breed of mastiff for this purpose. Although there are no records of Gomerans taking ship for America, every fleet took on water there. I had Bruco get on DaVilla’s Entrada, as some Gomerans, or at least Canary Island veterans, were on the expedition.

What happened was the Spanish took the women while their men were away and when they objected, the Spanish wiped them out. There is hardly any paternal DNA left among aboriginal Gomeran descendents.

Bruco has his own lead role in God’s Picture Maker, one of the few Sunset Saga novels I had professionally edited. You want the Dark Eyed Girl version.

LL: Thanks, James, for indulging me on this Part 2, please include any final thoughts you have. Readers, if you would like us to cover a particular book next, please let us know in the comments!

JL:  Lynn, I’m glad you took an interest in this. I was loathe to give up the project, but I had no choice, as the only English translation available omitted large tracts of Diaz’s manuscript, much of it pertaining to military equipment.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

This Design is Called Paisley: The Seduction of Mister Slickery by James LaFond

Robert Slavie is a sixty-year-old librarian; a life-long bachelor, overqualified for his job, with no place to go but home. Other than the possible achievement of his life-time goal to read 50,000 books before retirement, Robert does not have a lot to look forward to. But one winter morning a young woman bypasses his female colleague at the front desk and comes directly to him for assistance. When she immediately concocts a pet name for him and schedules another visit he feels the silent footfall of doom. Is there any way he can survive the web of seduction he is being drawn into?

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

T. Spoone Slickens, Inquire: The Truth About Black Folks by James LaFond

T. Spoone Slickens, Inquire, was born during a tropical storm on Cape Fear, North Carolina. He has recently emerged as a scholar of the urban American experience, teaching from his janitorial closet in the basement of a dying catholic church in Baltimore City.

This volume includes his essays: 

The Cure for What Ails Whitey 

Miechlin Mikya’s Free Lunch 

‘Smart White Folks?’ 

Scrimp Boy Sam’s Bouquet 

Donell Weston’s Bitchegg Hotel 

Also features the secret interview with Stefan Molyneux The Truth about Black America.

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

Dream Flower by James LaFond

Five Stories by James LaFond:

The Tribe
Being Joe’s Bitch
Love Stinks
Shawndrea’s Blessing
Dream Flower

Available in paperback and Kindle.

Modern Agonistics Q&A with Author James LaFond

LL: Hello again, James!

Let's take a break from talking about Sickness of the Heart and take a look at Modern Agonistics. This book is a highly readable account of your eponymous collaboration with Chuck Goetz, encompassing every kind of brutal combat you could think of, and most astonishingly, involving other characters who willingly participate in this practice.

My first question has nothing to do with all that. How do you keep records? As you know, I am a big fan of spreadsheets, but I have learned that you are unfamiliar with this marvelous technology. Yet you recount here information from thousands of encounters. How do you do it?

JL: We used small spiral memo pads and recorded our bouts, the first few years we did everything on a 5-point system. You start with five points and call yourself out when you take five points. A blunt hit was 1, a slash or non vital stab 2, and a vital slash or stab 3. So if you slash me once and I stab you twice, you call yourself out, scoring a 0 on defense and a 2 on offense, where I record a 3 on defense and a 5 on offense. We were trying to workout what worked, what happened when two guys just went at it with weapons. After a while, when more people were involved, we only used this for testing and I retired from keeping track of anyone’s record but my own, really as an experiment. I wanted to hit 1,000 stick-fights so that the math would be self-evident and match this up with my injuries, in order to determine how safe it was.

LL: James, the motto of Modern Agonistics is "As real as you want it." It seems like a core value of this endeavor is genuine, full contact, competitive combat. How do you find people to do this with? When you are training a fighter how soon can you tell if he will be willing to go the distance in this way?

JL: Chuck came up with that motto and he was my first recruit. I asked athletes, martial artists and assorted weirdos if they would like to try it. Roughly 90% of the martial artists recoiled in horror, perhaps 70% of the athletes did the same, and about half of the strange eggs, said, “Why not?” I found hockey and lacrosse players most amicable to fighting with weapons.

LL: One aspect I enjoyed, particularly through Evolutions 1.3 - 1.5 and beyond, is that you experienced a form of arms race, almost as though you worked your way through the development of weapons and armor through history, including crafting weapons and armor yourselves, as you and your training partners advanced and gained experience and skill. How much of this was a conscious decision to expand your armory, versus a natural progression?

JL: We wanted to try different weapons. It was gross act of morbid curiosity in many cases. The evolutionary aspect was just that, not planned. At first we added armor, then we took it away as we got better and narrowed the weapon set. If you are only dealing with one type of weapon you can minimize your armor, unless it is a pole axe or some other crushing extension weapon. We eventually settled for what most primitive warriors have settled with, using a round flexible stick to train, spar and compete with, as this generalizes to many other skills. We did not start out looking at it from an escrima point of view, but did end up using an escrima weapon set, stick and knife with limited machete.

LL: How did you come up with the idea to chain the opponent's weapons together? Has this ever been tried by anyone else?

JL: We didn’t chain the weapons together but held the chain between us, which gives the option to quit, by dropping it and keeps the encounter tense for spectators and does not allow resting. This was Hollywood inspired, I am afraid to say. I don’t have any historical basis for this. Gladiators were forced into close contact by a lanista armed with a prodding weapon. The chain was a way to replicate that forced proximity without getting extra people involved. We had enough trouble getting fighters, let alone officials. Besides, if there are officials for a new sport it can come under fire from the state athletic commission. Realizing this, we decided that taking responsibility for your safety and your opponent’s safety—by breaking off when the other guy is in trouble—was realistic practice for defending oneself on the street. This jived with the fact that more and more of our participants saw this as a type of reality based survival practice.

LL: This book has a lot of informative pictures, particularly in a yellow-walled, red-carpeted dungeon of punishment, as well as detailed instructions on stick fighting drills and techniques. Anyone who enjoyed Sean's recent videos (featuring James LaFond in a red t-shirt, and Sean Glass occasionally sans shirt) will get a lot out of Modern Agonistics, the book. How much do you think a fighter can advance through books and video?

JL: The “dungeon of punishment” was Sifu Edgar Livingston’s Tai-Chi school. He was aligned with Saint Jude’s Children’s hospital, the only honest charity we were able to find. We even got ripped off by the Maryland Diabetes Associate, who refused to credit us with the $260 donation we made because they said they only filled out paperwork on $1000 or more and the meathead I sent down with the money believed the thieves in their office.

Book learning combat depends on the person. In order to learn from books you need relevant experience and a partner. You cannot use a book alone unless you are an experienced fighter with some self-coaching ability. Realistically, books that I write as instructionals are reference works for trainers and coaches and for people who are being or have been trained and coached in similar activities.

Videos, on the other hand, are almost identical to the instruction had in the martial arts setting, which is a fair learning environment. The gym setting is better than learning via the ‘monkey see, monkey do” martial arts method. In boxing your goal is to be able to verbally coach a fighter who is looking at the guy that he is fighting while listening to you. In this sense the boxing and stick fighting books are much more useful for the coach than for the fighter. The videos are better for the fighter, especially the novice. Some fighters, with a governor on their ego and an ability to conduct an analysis of their body mechanics, have successfully become formidable combatants through books and videos. One of the ways this self-critique and self-coaching ability can be cultivated is by retooling your skill set in slow motion while you are injured.

LL: James, you cover scoring quite a bit here, including the importance of self scoring and the rationale behind determining when a fighter has been eliminated from competition. How does this fit in with your gaming writing? Do you have any active gaming projects right now?

JL: Once, when I was fighting Don Plot in 2006, with 10-inch polypropylene dagas I had him dialed in with the knife. He was just a stick-fighter and every time he advanced I stabbed him in the throat or face and the four corner judges saw no point. He looks at me, and says, “You better do it again.”

We move around and I stick him again and he chuckled. “I guess you’ll have to rip my head off before they notice.”

What I did was lifted my foot for the next stab and made a theatrical kill and they called the point. This points up the ridiculousness of judges scoring any fight with blades. I am the most experienced knife and machete fighter in the United States [though certainly not the best] and I cannot watch two guys that I have trained go at it and know what happened. In many cases a fighter does not know that he hit another fighter, especially when they are amped up. Calling yourself out is the only way. This was essentially how bare knuckle boxing worked.

I used my role playing game designing projects to bridge the reality fiction gap for others. I did three, with none of them, including the last, being playable by video game paced minds. In order to accurately pursue a combat simulation on paper it needs to be conducted at a pace that is at least 100 times slower than the action being simulated. What I used these role playing designs for Tribes, Fights and Triumph for was transferring my combat experience into a form that made a combat scenario builder for writing fiction. Although I don’t write that way—I don’t plot fights—someone else who does plot action scenes could use it like that.

I have yet to convert my 200 page Tribes sourcebook into fiction. I am in possession of over 20 excellent illustrations for the World of Oth and, as soon as I finish Drink Deep of Night, Seven Moons Deep, The Spiral Case and Yusef of the Dusk, I intend to begin publishing pocket-sized paperback novelettes of about 700-800 words, with Richard and Joseph’s fine art work as covers.

LL: Readers, this book has a ton of highly amusing anecdotes, pictures of men trying to hurt each other while wearing gladiator gear, valuable and detailed instructions and more. We know from Winter of a Fighting Life what this book cost James to write. I think there is nothing out there like Modern Agonistics, and strongly encourage you to pick up a hard copy or Kindle edition.

JL: One final word, Lynn. When I was promoting events for charity, I made sure that I stocked the front row with a few blood-thirsty babes, to whom I gave free tickets to and it worked like charm—with those meatheads fighting like savages for female approval. Thanks, Lynn, for reminding me of the good old days. I hope some young guys out there have some of their own to look forward to.

PS: Don't miss this video of James and Damien (a prominent figure in Modern Agonistics) fighting.  James is using a sword and shield, and Damien is using a pole flail.  More videos are available at James's main site, under the Modern Agonistics link.

(c) James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

The Broken Dance by James LaFond

The Broken Dance is LaFond's monumental work on the history of boxing from pre-history to the death of Alexander.  The Broken Dance is available in PDF as three separate volumes, or as a complete collection.  The first two volumes are also available in paperback.

The Broken Dance: Volume I: The First Boxers

A Fighter’s View of Prize-fighting from Gilgamesh to Goliath with 47 original illustrations by Joseph Bellofatto, Jr.

A systematic investigation of the origins of boxing; a biomechanical index of boxing methods; an exploration of sacral prizefighting in Babylon; the methods of the stick-fighting boxers of Egypt; and the secrets of the mysterious boxer kings of Crete. This is the first of three volumes that comprise The Broken Dance.

Available in PDF and paperback.

The Broken Dance: Volume II: The Gods of Boxing

The Gods of Boxing is a comprehensive study of ancient Greek boxing contests, training, methods, politics, and personalities. Every aspect of the ancient boxer's life is uncovered. Meet the heroes, villains, gods, and even a pre-Christian saint, who fought before the sacred altars of Thunderchief and the lesser Olympians.

Available in PDF and paperback.

The Broken Dance: Volume III: All-Power-Fighting

A study of ancient Greek combat arts including: the arts and culture of arête [warrior-virtue], pale [wrestling], pentathlon [five exercises], pankration [all-power-thing]; rankings of historical fighters; appendices; and a 1000+ word Hellenik Glossary. 145+ pages, 31 illustrations by Joseph Bellofatto, Jr.

Available in PDF.

The Broken Dance: The Complete Collection

A Figther's View Of Boxing & Prize-Fighting From Pre-History to the Death Of Alexander. More than 100 exclusive illustrations by Joseph Bellofatto Jr. The First Boxers, The Gods of Boxing, All-Power-Fighting. 454+ pages, 147 illustrations by Joseph Bellofatto, Jr.; all three volumes collected in a single file.

Available in PDF.

Shorn of Little Sissy Things by James LaFond

A Fighter's View of Ancient Combat: 2010-2014

Shorn of Little Sissy Things is a brutally hip view of ancient combat from the perspective of a modern stick-fighter, machete-duelist and boxing coach. The author offers a fighter’s view of ancient life, not the sissified backward looking dreamscape of the armchair mastermind, but the ‘oh, yeah, that would work’ matter-of-fact view shared by those who fight.

Includes: 

When Heroes Fought 

The 10 Worst Ancient Military Jobs 

Gladiators and Bodybuilders 

The Award Winning essay Little Sissy Things

a critical bibliography, and more

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

On Blood Sacrifice

This post is the fourth part in a series of discussions between James and Lynn on the work of Nassim Taleb, see part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Lynn:  Taleb wrote a piece on lent, Easter, and blood sacrifice that I wanted to discuss with you. My thoughts were that the lack of blood sacrifice in Western religious practices is akin to the relinquishment of the individual's responsibility for violence to the State. No bloodshed means no spiritual life. When I read the King James Bible at age 19, one of the few things I was able to gather from it is that worshiping God in the Old Testament meant sacrificing to God. It does not mean singing songs while swaying in the church pew. I grew up going to various super-fun-rock-band churches (that is from Ann Barnhardt, Queen of Crackpots), and the songs just make my skin crawl. I don't mind singing the older hymns though.

So far from requiring blood, or any effort whatsoever, most modern "non-denomenational" Christian churches insist that there is nothing for Christians to do but say a few magic words and accept salvation. It never felt right to me.

James:  Lynn, there are so many varieties of new Christian churches that I cannot even address that subject, other than to say that these churches only remain vibrant for the first two generations. There is a constant branching by young Christians, making their own churches, even building them with their hands, in a never ending attempt to correct for the materialism that tends to creep so easily into church life.

My sister left the Catholic Church to join a first-generation church. In the Catholic Church, as a boy, I was exposed to the gay, light-rock, feel-good, hippie version of New Age Catholicism and even at eight, saw it is a phony attempt to make religion cool for kids. There is, in Catholicism, a focus on sacrifice and the symbolism of blood, but the only sacrifice asked by the priest is the donation. I recall my parents being humiliated when their two dollar donations were posted in the church weekly, next to those made by business owners and CEOs. This is where religion always ends up and that is why American Christians have reformed as young churches constantly, for the four centuries of our continually fracturing history.

In the Appalachian and rural piedmont churches I have attended, the notion of sacrifice seems to focus on not taking the many pleasures that the gross world offers—a post monastic form of abstinence that fits well in such a pleasure-saturated society and I think makes a good surrogate for bleeding. The better postmodern churches are, in a sense, fertile monasteries.

Also, there is still a crusading notion among rural Christians who make up the bulk of U.S combatants in its money-grubbing wars, a notion I see as being exploited by the globalists, but is authentic none-the-less in the minds of many, who see themselves as holding back The Caliphate.

The musical orientation of some of the money-focused, feel-good churches you mention reminds me of the black ghetto churches in Baltimore, which manage to concentrate money and sexual access in the person of a store front minister. The only sacrifice being made in these churches is the woman’s giving of her oft-sampled sexual goods to the neighborhood patriarch, who stands as the alternative to the other two patriarchs in the black community: the drug king pin and White Daddy [government].

Traditionally, in American Protestantism, the notion of sacrifice has been Abrahamic, in that sons were sacrificed to the wars of expansion that spread the Gospels among the Heathen and that the lives of the early plantation Congregationalists in New England were literally sunk into the alien soil in their effort to eradicate the native forest ecology and replace it with a grassland. In 1868, Messach Browning recalled that he had done his Christian duty by siring a family of 64 sons, grandsons and great grandsons, who stood ready to fight for his nation—an overtly Christian nation.

Aside from the sacrifice of sons in war and the more heroic sacrifice of one’s self [which has never been the preferred American sacrifice, sons being favored over self], the protestant ethic of toil, or doing what a man can to live a virtuous life on an evil earth is almost Roman in character. The best example of this would be the ploughing scene in Sergeant York, where the hero, played by Gary Cooper is shown working the land, literally attacking the rugged natural environment.

In respect to sacrifice, in American culture, the notion among Catholics has been completely farmed out to the past, of Jesus taking the full burden. The aspects of sacrifice are revered, but they are not for men. This has really caused the guilt-rot to emerge strongly in American Catholicism, with third world immigrants and even Islam—the religion—being embraced as suffering foci for the post-suffering American Catholic. Currently joint Islamic-Catholic services are being held in Baltimore, and old Catholics, like my mother and aunt are being guilted into sitting through Spanish mass next to Mexicans carrying baby dolls in coffins. In this fashion the elder women in my family act out the simpering sacrifice of identity before the altar of their all-erasing God.

I suspect that the above notion of guilt-based sacrificed, of living prosperously as the benefactors of an ancient God’s suffering, lingers even in the secular, ethical construct of American Atheism, wherein a nominally Christian person, secularized beyond redemption, is led to believe that his abstinence from actual sacrifice can be atoned for by sacrificing his unborn children via omission, and stepping aside in sterile old age as the suffering slave class from Latin America and beyond takes the places at the American Table of the Last Supper that might have been occupied by his children.

The turning point for me, is the year of my birth, 1963, and the Yul Brynner movie Kings of the Sun, with Shirley Anne Field and George Chakiris. Brynner plays a proto-Comanche Indian chief who at first opposes, then allies with a fleeing Mayan King and his exiled people. The King, played by Chakiris, at one point overrules the high priest in the matter of sacrifice, noting that this new land was so fertile that no sacrifice need be made. [This is a heavily propagandistic story line aimed at indigenous white America.] In the end, the sacrifice is made on the temple stairs, when the native Chief, played by Brynner, dies defending the refugees from their pursuing enemies on the very stairs of the un-bloodied sacrificial pyramid. In the year of my birth a movie maker was already preaching what the new Christian sacrifice would be in America, the extinguishing of identity and patrimony, in favor of refugees from across the sea.

To get back to your objection to “singing songs and swaying in the church pew” as a form of religious expression that has replaced sacrifice, I might add that available evidence hints at conversion to Christianity of black slaves by their white masters as facilitated more easily by indulging the African penchant [which does, indeed, seem to be genetic] for song and dance. Again, the sacrificial aspect of toil is present, as it was through the entire Middle Ages, when the suffering serf carried the fighting and praying classes on his back in return for the promise that his way to eternal paradise had been assured by the sacrifice of Christ.

In summation, it is my opinion that in the Western World, with all of its indigenous traditions submerged by Christianity and with Christianity itself fighting off cycle after cycle of corruption introduced by the rampant materialism of modernity, that the notion of sacrifice remains three-tiered as it always has: work from the poor, money from the merchant, blood from the powerful and their pawns and offered with words from the ruling class.

The latter has three postmodern manifestations:

1. The powerful, and those of a liberal mind who align themselves with the elite, by and large, sacrifice their bloodline to their post-Christian ideology, by forgoing reproduction and adopting suffering groups and individuals as their children, in this way retaining much of the psychology of sacrifice.

2. The massive, secular edifice of modernity—in its America form—has retained a Christian patina, with mottos such as, “In God We Trust,” and “One Nation Under God,” not yet stricken from the American creed, encouraging predominantly Christian combatants to sacrifice their lives in the “The War on Terror.”

3. Every day, in every mid-sized to large city in America, the thugs of the Black Urban Mob that have risen since 2014, are shedding the blood of those who must bleed and die for the crime of being born white. Among the victims one will see a strong tendency not to blame their attackers, a common aspect of sacrificial victim behavior.

Thank you, Lynn.

(c) 2017 James LaFond and Lynn Lockhart

Of Lions and Men by James LaFond

From the author of Taboo You, Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation, and At the End of Masculine Time, comes a study of masculine culture in the Western World with a focus on tribalism and the Alpha Male, which is often symbolized by the lion in Western iconography. If you are a man that senses he is out of place in our feminized society, who has become suspicious of the social order to the point of rebellion or misanthropy, then this book was written for you.

Available in paperback and Kindle.

War Drums: Forty Miles from the Big House by James LaFond

As world media focused on the death of one petty criminal and the firestorm around a certain West Baltimore location, what else happened?

According to the author, the riots were primarily a diversionary tactic by drug gangs to put police out of position, for purposes that can only be conjectured, and secondarily, to facilitate a race purge, that placed white residents of Baltimore City and Eastern Baltimore County under black mob rule for a full week, while every police resource was diverted to handle the mushrooming media circus.

War Drums is a street level memoir of the working class people of a town often called Harm City, who were publicly and officially abandoned to the criminal underworld by their own municipal governments.

Available in paperback and Kindle.

A Sickness of the Heart Q&A with Author James LaFond

A Sickness of the Heart, by James LaFond, is a retelling of the expedition of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba to explore the Yucatan Peninsula in the Conquistador Period.

LL: James, what do you call this type of book, which I believe is similar to the approach you are taking with Sold, where you form a dramatic narrative around historical documents? In the case of Sold, I think the genre would be historical fiction, since there are explicitly fictional characters included in your story, is that the case here, with A Sickness of the Heart?

JL: In A Sickness of the Heart, I had no intention of doing any fictional-style narrative, until I reached the end of the Diaz account and felt the yawning sense that came from the fact that even though this was a complete tale of an Entrada, that it had been written as the first of two prologues to the tale of the Cortez Entrada. The Governor of Cassava Land epilogue felt right after I composed it, which convinced me that I should finish the account of the next expedition published in Our Captain, in the same fashion.

LL: I did not know until reading this, that the new world had woven fabric and used cotton for armor in pre-Colombian times. Do you have any experience with cotton armor through Agonistics?

JL: I have fought against men wearing modern versions of this same armor in the form of the WEKAF arnis jacket, which, when worn, makes one look like across between a transformer and a samurai. The quilting feature, along vertical and horizontal lines increases protection against slashes, as most slashes strike long a diagonal plain. The chief value of the cotton armor, which was also quilted, was against stone tipped wooden sword slashes and piercing missiles, which got through Spanish mail to the point where just about every soldier had numerous shallow punctures.

LL: Topical to another offline discussion we have had, which will soon be published I will quote the following from A Sickness of the Heart:

Ironically, the Catholic obsession with divine blood and the record of biblical sacrifice going back to Abraham through Jesus enabled the Spaniards to easily understand the bloody sacrificial rites of the Central American and Mexican priesthoods they were to encounter, even as they recoiled from the practice.

James, what do you know about Far Eastern spiritual practices, such as Confucianism and Shintoism. To my knowledge they focus on ancestor worship and filial piety. Is there a blood sacrifice element to these practices? Does this point to an early European influence in the New World? Or do you view blood sacrifice as an Abrahamic concept imported to Europe through Christianity, and only incidentally arising in the New World?

JL: On Confucianism and Shintoism I can’t speak. As for new world sacrificial cults, they seem to arise from the same well of primal human beliefs in the blood as a river of ancestral force connected to the supernatural realm. Blood is often seen as the male force coursing through the flesh which is often associated with the female, just as male sky gods are associated with lifegiving rain and sunlight and the earth goddesses with life-harboring earth-the flesh of the world. Reay Tannahill in Flesh and Blood, a History of the Cannibal Complex traces human sacrifice around the word into prehistory. In Campbell’s work he distinguishes between The Way of the Animal Powers, which is a form of sacrifice of a sympathetic creature and the Way of the Seeded Earth, which is focused on sacrifice of men and domestic animals, reflected in the Old Testament. The Judaic root of Christianity can be seen as an amalgamation of herding sacrifice, descending from the hunt, and an agrarian servitude [sacrifice by toil] descending from the feminine gathering root. The Epic of Gilgamesh demonstrates this process with Enkidu being the primal echo-brother of Gilgamesh. The sacrificial aspects of Christianity are enhanced far beyond the Judaic root through Egyptian Gnosticism [a Hellenic-Egyptian syncretism] and the sacrifice of a young god and the Hellenic sacrifice of the virgin mother impregnated by a god. There are three ancient boxers who were supposed to be the product of a virgin birth. The sacrifice of Socrates [body-taker] to the lie in standing for the truth is also woven into this. Catholicism developed with multiple sacrificial roots and was easily spread through pagan Europe by its ability to interact in a syncretic way with existing sacrificial practices, which made Catholicism perfect for Amerindian conquest propaganda. In contrast, the more rational Puritans could never convert the mass of any Indian nation to their forgiving faith, whereas the Spanish priests converted the sons of the Aztec priests in mass. The best reflection of this I have seen, other than the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, is the candle dedicated to Saint Mars, who is described as being a pagan god who came over to Christ and now fights for the savior against the enemies of God! He is even depicted in Roman armor! This is how the conquistadors saw themselves. The novels of crusading adventure from this period are so bloody it is almost mind boggling.

LL: You provide a great deal of detail in the drubbings these Spaniards took, as they sailed the coast of the Yucatan, facing large groups of well armed and armored Mayans, while they themselves were weakened by lack of water (due to faulty equipment). Conquering the New World wasn't such a walk in the park after all. I doubt it would be of any consolation to today's competitively aggrieved minority groups that their ancestors fought valiantly and effectively half a millennium ago.

JL: The conquistadors were uniquely suited, in psychological terms, to such a conflict. You will find that most of the key men came from Estremadura, the West Virginia of Spain, or the Portuguese border. They perfected manhunting in the Canary Islands, with lessons learned against the Moors. The cultures they clashed with in America were recently empowered invaders, with the Aztec and Incan empires both a mere century or so old, and the Mayans basically in a post apocalyptic stage. The very interesting aspect is the conquest of Darien, current Panama, where island conquest methods were modified to coastal operations and then entradas. Many of these failed. Soto was involved in a disaster in the Orinoco watershed. All of the Florida expeditions ended in disaster. The native descendants should be proud and the mixed-race descendants doubly proud of their martial heritage.

LL:  James, I have more questions about this book. It is a short, but densely presented combination of primary material, informed commentary, dramatic history and has an extensive epilogue of reviews of source books. If you don't mind I'd like to do a Part 2 of this Q&A.

JL:  I will wax late medieval Spanish here and act in deference to the maternal while promising to remain brutally paternal.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

A Sickness of the Heart by James LaFond

One of humankind’s greatest and most dramatic cultural extinction events unfolded some 500 years ago when a band of ruthless adventurers, under the leadership of a rogue lawyer, outwitted scheming colonial politicians and blood thirsty cannibal warriors, and out worked a hostile environment in their bid to take down an alien nation. In this adaptation of The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz the author stays true to the old conquistador’s fighter’s view of campaigning in exotic lands beyond the boundaries of The Known World. Part One tells the story of the ill-fated Expedition Of Francisco Hernandez De Cordoba, a little known prelude to the Cortez Expedition, and provides a critical guide and summary of additional reading material for the Conquistador Period.

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

Happily Ever Under by James LaFond

How has mankind managed to shackle itself to various forms of servitude, slavery, debasement and oppression over the ages? Recently, while talking to a homeless couple at an East Baltimore bus stop, the author, James LaFond, discovered that their names were Jack and Jill, that they are 33,000 years old, and that they knew the ten answers to this ages old question! These two claimed to know everything about the enslavement of mankind, but soon fell into a violent argument over the fate of a piece of Sumerian crockery. Before he was able to finish his interview, Jack and Jill had been tazed, cuffed and dragged off in the back of a paddy wagon by responding Baltimore City police officers, leaving him to fill in the blanks as best he could. Happily Ever Under is their story.

Available in paperback.

Modern Agonistics by James LaFond

Modern Agonistics is not a style, art or system. It is simply a format for training, experimentation and competition with weapons. The goals of the participants range from cross-training, self-defense and thrill-seeking, to craftwork [like weapon and armor fabrication] and attempts to reconstruct extinct fighting arts. Practitioners of over two-dozen fighting arts have utilized this format since 1998 without sustaining serious injury. Participants have been both male and female, and have ranged in age from 11 to 65; in size from 75 to 375 pounds, and in experience from novice to professional. Most participants have been males in their late teens and early twenties. We have no dues, rituals, traditions or barriers. This is simply a network for combat weaponry enthusiasts. We are just a curious group of fighters. If you want to participate you are welcome. Our motto is "as real as you want it." Agonistics is an ancient Hellenic term that translates as "contest-preparation." The root is Agon meaning "contest." The English word agony was borrowed from the ancient Greek term for "contestant's suffering" referring to the trials of a combatant. This is admittedly a terrible term to use in modern America, as virtually everyone misreads agonistics as agnostics which is also from the ancient Greek and means "no knowledge" and is used as a self-descriptive term by people who are not sure about the existence of divinity. My favorite misreading of agonistics was when the Baltimore City Paper ran our ad for a seminar at Sifu Clark's in 2005 as Modern Antagonistics. Some guy called me and wanted to know if we were a network for hate groups.

Available in paperback and PDF.

Note from Lynn Lockhart:  The paperback edition available through Amazon was published later and includes more content, including charming descriptions of agons (meets or tournaments) that took place in 2014, as well as a great deal of technical coaching material.  This is a book you will want in hard copy if (when) times get tougher.

Menthol Rampage by James LaFond

A Harm City Novelette, with a cast of made-for-noir Characters drawn from the Author's urban oral history.

Imagine if you were stricken with a condition that caused you to become deathly ill in the presence of cigarette smoke. Imagine also that your girlfriend and coworkers—and the world in general—kept blowing it in your face. Imagine further, that you are a lowly, scrawny carpenter, who, when you 'snap', and decide to strike back at the world, has only the contents of your tool belt with which to even the score, even as the cops hunt you through the streets of Harm City like a rabid dog? Under such conditions, how many smokers could you take off of the planet?

Welcome to the dark flowering of Jay Jay Brooks, a man who will never again take the crap the world hurls at him.

Available in paperback and PDF.

How the Ghetto Got My Soul by James LaFond

The author gives a varied and insightful glimpse into a little known, and often less understood, segment of Postmodern America, the dwindling midsized city. The American ghetto has become an internal wilderness which incubates the worst aspects of postmodern life, and is rarely seen from a non-law enforcement perspective. How the Ghetto Got My Soul brings this often gray world to life.

Available in paperback.

Taboo You by James LaFond

James LaFond has been banned from a writers’ group because of the content of his work, barred from the AAMMA because of his writing, barred from USA Boxing because of his involvement in stick-fighting, rejected by four publishers on politically correct grounds, dumped by nine women, kicked out by three women, attacked by members of six black ghetto gangs, targeted for death by BASH [Baltimore Area Skin Heads] and the Wasted Youth [white street gang], threatened by three police officers, harassed by eight police officers, chased through the nighted streets of Baltimore by feral pit bulls, pursued through the streets of Baltimore by numerous pairs of rednecks in pickup trucks, was once chased down a back alley by a gear-head in a yellow mustang, was once hunted through the ghetto by a scorned psychobitch with a blade, has been homeless, was once barred from three high school classes for reading, walked away from an $80,000 a year management job without giving notice to take up writing for an annual salary of $198, will be homeless, has turned down 13 promotion offers and 9 management positions, and is generally regarded as either insane or eccentric depending on which Baltimoron you ask. Taboo You is his advice for living such a life if you so choose, and how to survive with dignity, as an individual, in our sick tribal world.

Taboo You is available in paperback and as a PDF.

Predation by James LaFond

In this eye-opening piece the author utilizes 16 brutal and hilarious true tales to illustrate how those who hunt us make lethality-enhancing and risk-limiting choices in their endless quest to separate us from our money, our virginity, our piece-of-mind, and our body.

Available as a PDF in the site store.  

The Logic of Force by James LaFond

For four years, James LaFond conducted a study of violence in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. Following up on The Logic of Steel, his highly regarded look into the reality of edged-weapon attacks, LaFond now presents The Logic of Force, a study of assaults featuring blunt weapons and unarmed attacks.

The Logic of Force tells stories of people who were caught in these blunt-force attacks—victims, attackers, eyewitnesses, and Good Samaritans who bravely stepped in to break up the fights. Chronicled in the vernacular of the street, these stories are gritty, entertaining, and—most important for those interested in self-defense—educational. Violent men are painfully predictable, if we bother to pay attention. This study underscores the importance of tactical awareness—and the high cost exacted for not staying alert. Just in case you do end up in a dangerous situation, these accounts show you what will and will not work in a short, feral, winner-take-all brawl, as well as the disturbing range of blunt-force objects that can be used as improvised weapons to hurt you.

One of the most violent cities in the world, Baltimore can teach all of us valuable lessons about avoiding or surviving violence. The Logic of Force teaches you how to live peacefully among the predators on your street.

The Logic of Force is out print and has limited availability.

The Logic of Steel by James LaFond

The Logic of Steel is not about the art of knife fighting. Its sole purpose is to capture the cold, hard, logical nature of edged-weapon encounters as experienced by author James LaFond and more than 90 other people. This analysis of more than 250 knife fights is told from the perspective of the attackers, eyewitnesses and victims. The action is broken down by weapon type and use patterns. The circumstances, motivations and mechanics of real-world blade and shank encounters are illuminated through the use of gripping (and sometimes comical) first-person accounts, photographs and hard statistics. The author also examines the psychology, injury patterns and legal ramifications of knife fighting, as well as providing invaluable tips on preventing clinches and groundfighting from escalating into a knife fight, surviving unarmed against a blade-armed assailant, "dressing for success" against a knife fight, spotting a knifer and predicting his behavior before it's too late, assessing when it is in your best interest to run for your life instead of fighting a knife-wielding opponent and much more.

Available in paperback and Kindle editions.

The Fighting Edge by James LaFond

James LaFond has been training in various U.S., European, Korean, Chinese and Filipino martial arts for over 40 years. He is also a veteran boxer and a laborer in one of America's toughest cities. He knows that the martial arts do not present all the realities of real combat and that 30 seconds on the sidewalk is worth three years in the dojo. In this book he explores the practical value, study and application of the martial arts in relation to real violence. What is it like to be in a real fight against deranged, drunk or drugged opponents? What is it like to be punched in the head? What do you do if your attacker is armed and you're not? What about the claims of various martial arts - are they valid? Which martial art is better for real fighting? Reading this book will help you maximize your training and become a better, smarter fighter.

Available in paperback and Kindle editions.

Defeating the Perspective Trap

James, let's continue our discussion on Taleb's antifragility, see part 1, and part 2.

LL: I think you have applied this idea of antifragility in your own life quite extensively, especially the way that any aggression displayed against you is material for your writing. I often wonder what the learning process must have been like for you, much earlier in your life, as you developed your approach to managing the constant aggression in your environment. Can you comment on that?

JL:  At 11, after five years of being beaten and tormented by older children and teenagers, I talked my father into a punching bag and weight set and stayed inside until I could hit hard enough to make the floor above shake. The first ingredient a person needs to deal with aggression is the ability to apply aggression. You have to make at least one example before you can begin the nuanced threat negotiation that has typified most of my life. The sports comparison would be that you have to attain a certain baseline conditioning to engage in the sport in a learning way. By age 15 I had an aura of menace that kept almost everyone away. After nearly killing a man at 18 and narrowly avoiding prison time, I unlearned this, and had to learn it again on the job and on the way to work. By age 31, when I walked into a strip club—all 143 pounds of me—bouncers wanted to be my friend, businessmen would ask me to take their seat and the strippers would compete for my attention. This had only to do with the fact that I had become used to dealing with mobs of black youth and crews of gangbangers six nights a week and carried myself on a constant combat footing—was flat-out suicidal for most of my 30s. I had a D& D Charisma rating of 6 out of 18—just a bad actor who never initiated. The negroes could smell this, that I was like a coiled snake. I was really a creepy person who was utterly callous with everyone but my sons. My wife suffered greatly from this studied neglect of the softer parts of the world.

LL: Taleb has noted that he avoids anything or anyone that is "middle brow." He associates with only the most elite in any academic field, or taxi drivers, doormen, (and maybe grocers?). Back in 2008 he was getting death threats for his comments on the banks and markets and took up deadlifting to deter attacks. Now his deadlift is over 300 lbs (he is in his late 50s with no previous athletic history). He loves hanging in the gym with the meatheads. He doesn't care for extensive proofreading of his writing, which is something he has in common with you. You specialize in mining the dregs of Baltimore for both your fiction and non-fiction. You have also been memorializing the lives of so many who served in unacknowledged slavery during the "colonial" era. Is it a coincidence that our elites wish to erase these classes of people who possess a type of understanding that has been effectively brainwashed out of the more compliant, educated classes?

JL: Okay, Lynn, you know how you continually take umbrage over my assertion that I’m a dumbass? Well, I am. I won’t get into the years of crying as a child as I tried and failed to learn basic math, even with a tutor and remained unable to read two years after my younger brother was reading toy assembly instruction. Yet, the people in the middle of our society—you and most of my readers, who are college educated or brilliant laymen—are continually dumbfounded at how I can make deductions and observations that astound men such as Ulric Kerensky—who is a flat-out genius, I mean a dude who could have been a Tesla in another age, before the regimentation that drives minds like his underground. He calls it wisdom, what I have, and he is right. How did I get all of this insight that the big brains and beautiful minds gawk at and misunderstand?

I aspired to learn, to read, and finally did. Made certain to read what others generally did not, history, anthropology, religion as well as the wars all boys read about. I did this so I could feel smart, not having the confidence to compete with others mentally in any way. Then, knowing myself unsuited for middle management, I stayed at the bottom of the bottom of the working class economy, a simple clerk in grocery stores for decades, refusing 13 offers of promotion as I slowly learned, and then finally learned that I was seeing that business from a perspective that no management person sees it from, as managers start on their track early and never gain deep experience at the low level. I had lower class perspective. When I finally agreed to a management job I held out for the top spot and got it, doing things that smarter, more experienced mangers—who could actually count money, for instance—could not do. I understood the engine that drove 60% of supermarket volume like no one else. I built a 7-man crew that carried a 110 person store out of failure and into profit.

Lynn, the people in the middle always suffer from lack of perspective—they are the meat, the grist of the social mill, the dupes and the fools. In early modern Britain, as the poor were being driven to the cities by the rural rich, where they were preyed upon my the Dickensian middle class, they formed an alliance with the urban old money, the heirs of fading fortunes and formed what was called “The Fancy” and came to be known as “the sporting set,” in America. The men at the social apogee and at the social knee saw the world in like and ancient ways, where the herd, the flock, the fold of the merchant class and those aspiring to a place on its lower rung, clung to the merchant values that amounted to the worship of property and shunned all things spiritual, such as honor. The Fancy birthed prizefighting as the sport it is today, gangs of poor thugs and sets of dandy’s working as pug and sponsor, attendant and spectator to the fighters, their living mythic heroes, a thumb in the eye to the depraved middle class who campaigned for an end to prizefighting for over a century and failed. The middle class even fell like ducklings into the cult of celebrity born by boxing—with John L. Sullivan being the very first modern celebrity.

Men low and high saw that materialism was ultimately the death of humanity and gloried in risking health and fortune in a brutal imitation of the ancient heroes that had returned to the human imagination with the translation of Greek and Latin literature from the ancient world. Boxing literature from 200 years ago is chock full of ancient comparisons. The poor men played the hero to their fellows and betters as the smartest of the rich men read to them or wrote for them of the ancient heroes.

In short, Taleb figured out what I only learned through gross repetition and long years in the social depths he somehow framed in his imagination.

LL: Taleb has also introduced another concept -- skin in the game. This is probably the most important. He says you cannot trust anyone who does not take risks in their field. I can think of quite a few ways you exhibit this quality, and have therefore earned high credibility. For one thing, you write under your own name, in topics that are highly taboo, both to the ruling class and to some of the dissident groups. You are a pedestrian in possibly the most dangerous city in the US. You gave up your lucrative day job to write. I don't think there is a better example of skin in the game than your work on ancient weapons through Modern Agonistics. How can anyone believe a Ph.D. sitting in his office, when James LaFond has sacrificed blood and bone to learn the use of these weapons, in addition to your extensive reading?

JL:  He re-introduced the oldest masculine aspect of tribal life into our sick world of liches, wraiths and zombies. Lynn, now you know why I resist pleas to scamper to safety out of Baltimore, because skin in the game is all I really have that most literate humans lack, the source of my only real value as a non-fiction writer.

Now, the Ph.D. in his office cult that we have has real roots. Amongst the large brained creatures that make up my leadership [a Freudian typo I’m keeping since you people have pretty much led me around by the literary nose—I don’t even decide what I read anymore. I’m like a crib-note generator for busy minds.], I probably fall on the short end of the scale in terms of brain power, but am swimming in a wealth of experience. Think of a more primitive society—like Big Ron’s Baltimore—where the average knucklehead is nearly retarded and a fellow of mine and Ron’s good but not great intelligence, becomes a sage or the guy with the right read on a situation while others get run over by a chain of events they may have initiated. When everybody has the same experience, then being the Ph.D. is a big deal. This is the position of the coach in athletics. The intelligence of coaches over athletes is usually a larger spread than you’d see between management and labor. This, again, encourages high levels of adaptability in sports, with pro athletics outpacing most sciences in terms of adaptation of application, because you have brilliant coaches with a gut knowledge of the activity, communicating with the meatheads getting hit. Very few high-level athletes show any aptitude for coaching. So, where does the Ph.D. cult fit?

It fits in barrooms, in locker rooms, in a kick-ass Colonel’s command center, that’s why sports and war and beating the shit out of people, evolve and a democracy—a thing all about the collective center, about meat herders making the herd feel like they are serving it—has not changed since Athens.

Thanks for making me think this morning.

James

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

God's Picture Maker by James LaFond

The Sunset Saga Book 3: Cities of Dust, Part 4

Three-Rivers possesses the power to command the thunderbirds and slip through the folds in Time. When he tricked Burnt Man and stole his thunder-hoop, he promised to make this up to his estranged benefactor by bringing the picture maker called Leonardo out of the past. Since Leonardo is just a Whiteman, Three-Rivers is not so concerned about his rights, and means to steal him into the future.

Bruco fought with DaVilla and Cortez and now serves the red-skinned sorcerer Three-Rivers in a quest through Time that will bring him uncomfortably close to his own past. Hyacinth is a twice widowed Dine` [Navaho] in service to a time-bending Iroquois prophet whose judgment and mental health seem erratic at best. Leonardo is a toiling apprentice to Maestro Verrocchio, who—being a poor student of Latin—despairs of ever winning the patronage of the leading Florentine families. What kind of devil’s bargain would he be willing to make to fulfill his artistic ambitions?

Available in paperback and Kindle format.

Behind the Sunset Veil by James LaFond

The Sunset Saga Book 3, Cities of Dust, Part 2

Behind the Sunset Veil tells the story of eight individuals involved in the struggle to bend Space-Time for Man’s own purposes:

-Mister Sigmund Shuei a 29th Century time-traveler stranded in the savage 21st Century. 

-Jay Bracken, a time-traveler rapidly losing his mind due to Translocation Psychosis. 

-Charlie Robinson, a scientist surrounded by adventurers trying not to lose his relevance. 

-Three-Rivers, having stolen the Whiteman’s thunder, has the ability to bend Time, and has decided that it is about SpaceTime to turn the tables on the Whites—as soon as he and his totemic squirrel cop some weed. 

-Aristotle, father of logic and science. 

-Arlene Higgins, a time-hunter tasked with bringing Aristotle forward before he is murdered in the wake of Alexander’s untimely death in 323 B.C. 

-Sebastian de Canete, a 16th Century Franciscan monk working as Arlene’s translator. 

-Joan Henderson, CIA, investigating a man that appears to be a genetic weapon. 

Behind the Sunset Veil is at once a rollicking science-fiction adventure and a darkly illuminated fantasy that veers between 17th Century messianic conclaves, and the 21st Century Narcostate, to vivid scenes of ancient Hellenic life.

Available in paperback and in pdf at the James LaFond site store.

Out of Time by James LaFond

The Sunset Saga Prequel: Flight of The Condor

Little Posie Senski was a ‘special’ boy whose Mom homeschooled him under the supervision of the enigmatic Man in the Gray Suit. One day, after Mom ran away, Posie met Tina, the golden-skinned night-haired woman who seemed to know everything, and was also his new Mother. Since meeting Tina, Posie’s life became one adventure after the other. For, as coincidence would have it, Tina, when not mothering her ‘special’ boy, directed assignments for a military contractor. As a young man Posie up-gunned his name to Pozer to match his physicality, eventually severing ties with the manipulative Tina and striking out on his own. But it seemed that Fate, who, as it turned out, had golden skin and night-black hair, had a way of catching up with Pozer Senski. Out of Time is the stand alone novella that sets the stage for The Sunset Saga.

Available in paperback.