Posted by If you want your pre-teen or teenage boys to learn a love of poety, you can do worse than the work of Alan Seeger. If you want your pre-teen or teenage boys to MASTER basic math, and the fundamentals of probability, you can do much worse than introducing them to a tabletop strategy game called BattleTech. It teaches some fundamentals of engineering, absolutely pounds the basic math skills, and will leave your tween-ager a whiz at calculating odds on a pair of six-sided dice. All of this to the glory of big, stompy robots you can design or redesign to your own advantage. Would you like your kids to know principles of scarcity, recycling, and salvage? It’s in there. Add some more depth and you can even help them learn personal finances, international politics, or let some of the glorious ideas spur them back to look at what real-world influences inspired the fiction.
Math, tactics, fellowship, stories, honor, history, and practicality; I have been a die-hard fan of the BattleTech universe since I first came across it at the age of twelve, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the dew of creation was still wet upon the grass of the world.
Throughout my life, it is not possible to remain my friend for long without my desire to share excellent stories with loved ones exposes you to BattleTech. I am not the only man who has had a lifelong love with this IP. One of the best of those is a gentleman with a master’s in history who goes by Tex in YouTube, and his sci-fi channel is called The Black Pants Legion. He puts together the most amazing presentations of a story that I love (and let us recall; I am all about stories).
Last night, Tex droopped a teaser withi excellent BattleTech graphics, to the spoken poetry of Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”. When this excellent combination of Lost Generation military poetry and my favorite wargaming nerd hobby came together, I leaped at the chance to share it with my former gamer friends, and then added my English nerd or military nerd friends to the link.
In less than 60 seconds, Facebook deleted my post for “violating the rules,” accusing me of spamming by sharing a post to less than 10% of my Facebook followers. So, this became both a teaching moment as well as a moment to share.
For my BattleTech friends of generations past and present, here is yet another fine offering by Tex, the best of the BattleTech YouTubers. What a fun ride it will be! I hope that, for some of you, this brings back memories of time gone by, whether that memory is of adolescence, college, several BattleTech leagues I organized, or the current ongoing storyline my friends are still playing through alongside me: Enjoy some great graphics and fine poetry.
For my fellow history nerds: I have long held to the idea that The Lost Generation was an act of God. Namely, I believe that God used the battlefields of WWI to harvest unto himself the ripe crop of honorable, courageous, and faithful young men. Read their writings and their anecdotes. What glorious courage, integrity, faith, zeal, and loyalty existed in that dark war that our modern mostly-Marxist professors like to gloss over and skip right on to the Spanish flu or the rise of progressivism in the West. Seeger’s work is denegrated as immature (the man died before the age of thirty) and contains such sentiments as are currently out of favor among our self-appointed betters. Nevertheless, there are few better places to understand the zeitgeist that drove millions of courageous young men to cross continents to fight for God and country than the poetry of one who made the ultimate sacrifice in that cause. If his poetry is to be believed, and I do believe it, with little regret and less looking back to the safety of cowardice or apathy.
For my fellow English nerds: In a generation culpable of criminalizing masculinity and leaving the strengths of past generations behind, it can be a struggle to even find permission to call boys and men to the idea that poetry can give voice to the admirable qualities of courage, steadfastness, strength, honor, loyalty, and all those qualities women thrive in the presence of and wilt when we — to steal Lewis’s phrase — castrate our young men and then bid them reproduce. Kipling’s unabashed machismo is denounced as toxic masculinity or — gasp — imperialism. Here is proof that Seeger’s poetry strikes on the same deep veins of what we men believe we were made to be, and without shame in the face of challenge or peril. We can add him to the list of black market verse smuggled by note or by rote to young men beaten down by a culture that criminalizes them by genetalia and skin color.
And for those on either side of the political aisle, this is how you get Donald Trump. When the hoi polloi must choose between and open boor who appears to understand and fight for them, or a life where Big Brother Is Watching at all times and at all places to smack down any wrongthink, it is no wonder that The Orange Man Bad — and remember that I left the Republican party rather than vote for the man in 2016 — got millions more votes his second run for office than he did in his first.
In BattleTech: The Clans, as written by Democrat and outspoken liberal Michael Stackpole, whose work I generally love, are a nearly perfect Marxist/Leninist utopia. They monitor and control all aspects of life, so that no one is allowed outside of their proper place. They agree on The Message — called the Rememberance — and any deviation from the founder’s dream, which did away with nations, gender roles, and capitalism is punished by reeducation, exile, or death. The Clans practice planned parenthood, abortion, eugenics, and utter racial equality in a violently meritocratic (as judged by your masters) society. As only fictional Marxism can do: it even has a better education system than those degenerate Inner Sphere inhabitants with their marriages, families, unsupervised intermingling of inferior genes, and free markets. Just pay no attention to the Rise of the Jade Falcon series exploring the institutionalization of statutory rape among the leading clan where teachers use their teenage victims as sex toys without remorse or consequence. We can ignore that as effectively as Democrats supporting teachers’ unions ignore America’s public school systems suffering more than 100x the sexual abuse rates of the Catholic Church.
But on Twycross, the Marxist military totalitarian war machine got its first kick in the teeth by merely human byproducts of traditional families and free societies. I can’t wait to watch. THAT is a story worth telling.
Whether I wanted to share this with you for its poetry, for its imagery, to bring back BattleTech memories, for Lost Generation imgaery, or for the sheer safe glory of its presentation: Here is the video my self-appointed masters and betters in Facebook would not permit me to share before.
Enjoy
Lagrandil 