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Getting Back to an ‘Honorable Manhood’
I’m a proud Gen Xer — not because we were so great, but because we are the last generation still attached to old school. We were raised at the tail end of an America that still had connections to the texture and oddity of what Greil Marcus called that “Old, Weird America.” We still listen to classic rock on vinyl without irony, but we also knew who Glenn Miller and Perry Como were. Sinatra was still touring and still mattered. We watched old movies, lots of them — Angels with Dirty Faces, The Ox-Bow Incident, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy.
We don’t need new definitions of manhood. We need old ones — honor, duty, imagination, restraint, brotherhood.
Where I grew up in New York, there were only eight channels — 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 21. My father wasn’t paying for cable; we had an antenna on the roof, and that was good enough. We didn’t have a remote in my house. You watched what was on. This was before VCRs. We watched the Mets on WOR, outside in the summer (no AC!) in black and white on an old portable General Electric 12-inch. We watched shows that parents watched like The Honeymooners and The Odd Couple, Barney Miller and Car 54, Where Are You? We could talk to our parents and older cousins about stuff that was way older than us.
We also read books from bookmobiles and tons of magazines. I learned to love the written word from the pages of Sports Illustrated, especially the great stories in the back by writers like Frank DeFord, Rick Reilly, Dan Jenkins, and even George Plimpton. We had our own stuff too — punk, grunge, and films.
If you were a Gen Xer, you probably saw Trainspotting (1997), Danny Boyle’s frantic adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel about down-and-out Scottish junkies and the pointlessness of modernity. It’s a movie you couldn’t unsee. Near the end, the central characters — Mark, Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie — pull off a shady high-stakes heroin deal in a ragged London hotel. To confirm the purity of the smack, a strung-out wastel in a black knit hat, a torn drab green hoodie, and filthy jeans, whose only purpose in life seems to be to test “gear” for the underworld, enters the room. The image of that lost soul has lingered with me.
That guttersnip character now seems a metaphor for today’s young men. Unfortunately, there seem to be more of them, though now they’re numbing themselves in other ways too — video games, porn, social media, pills. They’re wafting in their parents’ basements, going nowhere, connected to nothing, disconnected from the past, and uncertain of their futures.
Too many young men are unwell. They’re four times more likely to die by suicide, three times more likely to struggle with addiction. Record numbers aren’t getting married, dating, or working. They feel like they have little or no purpose.
Something has to fill that void.
Unfortunately, there are unseemly influencers and “alpha” coaches peddling a brittle masculinity. But beneath all the posturing is a real hunger to connect. The question is: what will they turn to?
Enter Gen Xer Shilo Brooks. His prescription for the despair of modern manhood is simple: read.
Brooks, a Texas-born scholar now serving as president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, hosts a new podcast for The Free Press called Old School. He wants to bring men back to books — the real ones. His goal is to create a brotherhood of readers, rediscovering what once made men strong.
Brooks’s story brings credibility. His early life was rough-and-tumble — his stepfather stole his mother’s savings, leaving them destitute. But his third father, a Vietnam veteran with a high school education, taught him what steadiness and strength looked like — not through boisterous posturing, but by showing him the quiet power of reading. “It is powerful for a boy to see a grown man read,” Brooks says. “A great book induces self-examination and spiritual expansion. When a man is starved for love, work, purpose, or vitality, a novel wrestling with those themes can be metabolized as energy for the heart. When a man suffers from addiction, divorce, or self-loathing, his local bookstore can become his pharmacy.”
Brooks doesn’t offer New Age self-help because deep reading isn’t easy. It demands patience, imagination, and humility. Great books slow you down and allow you to see yourself as you truly are.
For Brooks, reading is a ladder back to the light of sanity.
Maybe that’s why his work feels so right. We’ve forgotten that an education — an old-school education — isn’t about credentials but conversation, the kind you have with minds greater than your own. A man who truly reads doesn’t just learn to get a grade; he inherits the profound grammar of courage and struggle.
And isn’t that what we want for our sons? I know I don’t want my boys ending up like that skell in Trainspotting, whose only purpose is the next hit. Maybe if they find themselves in books, and the conversations they stir, they can save themselves — and the next generation.
We don’t need new definitions of manhood. We need old ones — honor, duty, imagination, restraint, brotherhood. Maybe a library card, not an iPhone, is one piece of the puzzle back to “honorable manhood.”
READ MORE from Pete Connolly:
What Graham Platner’s Tattoo Really Reveals
Shohei Ohtani Plays Baseball Differently
The New York Times Op-Ed on HBO’s Task Highlights Our Two Americas.
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