Big Balls Needs a Drum Circle

The DOGE-Boy Cometh

One thing that people of all political and social stripes agree upon is that men exist. They exist in the way nature exists. With myriad meanings and forms. Without fixed definition. A dude constellation hanging in the masculine night.

Another thing we all agree on is that many of these glittering lights in the Drakkar-noir night sky have no idea what or who they are.

Which is just to say that many men (#notall) in their Boys-II-Men phase of late teens / early twenties search out a version of “man” to become. Their manhood may feel inevitable to them. They were destined to enact masculinity as a pasty Musk-minion. They don’t see that they are just the latest crop of confused boys led astray by broken men who need a hug they will never get and claim not to want. These are vulnerable little bros. Scared, probably. They listen to a jar of sentient protein powder named Joe Rogan for hours each day. They call themselves “Big Balls” and are currently overthrowing our government.

Elon Musk and his eager DOGE boys are, arguably, male. They are, most likely, man-like children who have been filled with endless hours of guy talk from chortling podcasters.

In the mid-20th century, modern industry turned men into dull husks: strong, silent heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen who were afraid of the portraying the slightest hint of femininity. In the 21st century, meaningless jobs and endless streams of hateful YouTubers are turning boys into pricks who wish they lived in the 1950s, a veritable pricktopia in their view. Throughout the last one hundred years and change, older boys have sought someone, anyone, who could help them navigate the roiling waters of manhood. Now technology enables any old grifter on steroids to beam their meaty voices directly to the cerebrums of our young. And the young, even the dickish kids taking over the social security system, are vulnerable. Tender. Malleable.

I know because I was one. And I found a man to teach me.

My Men’s Movement

Let me take you back to 1990 when I was nearly Big Balls’s age. The scene is early Saturday morning, an elementary school in Beaverton, Oregon…

I dock my bamboo-cream colored Buick Century in the parking lot when I hear the drums. Something strange and wild is emanating from the gymnasium. An ecstatic rhythm incongruously washing over the suburban landscape.

An alien pulse.

As I approach the glass doors of the gym, I also approach the mother consciousness of Beowulf’s Grendel, every witch who ever tried to throw a child in an oven, darkness and moonlight, Gaia in fierce, grey-haired abandon, Stevie Nicks in a top-hat and sheer negligée… the drums are wild feminine energy, our guru tells us. They are the sounds of the Ecstatic Mother.

I open the door to a chaotic reverie: a few hundred men, nearly all white and middle-aged, drumming. Some are drumming on faux Native American faux animal skin faux pow-wow drums. Some have a block of wood and a stick. Some are pounding on metal folding chairs with pens or rulers. Some stand and awkwardly jerk about. The drumming men form two lines between which other men are doing a suburban-dad version of a cakewalk. There is whooping. I join the line of men and begin to clap. Soon, the pounding quiets. As if moved by a mystic, ancient hand, we begin to form a conga line, holding the hips of the man in front of us, kicking our legs out. Loud again. Screaming in joy.

I am 20 years old.

I have discovered what it means to be a man.

At some point our guru walks in, looking as if he just woke up (which is how he always looks) and we quiet down. His name is Robert Bly. He is tall with a crown of wild gray hair and a voice that is equal parts Elmer Fudd and Johnny Cash. As he talks and recites poetry, he strums a bouzouki. He has a tic where he will say something twice, changing his emphasis and rhythm:

 Now do you understand the men who laugh all night in their sleep?

 NOW do you understand the MEN who laughallnight…. In their sleep…

He makes sweeping statements about fathers.  He says that before the industrial revolution, sons were tuned to a “masculine frequency” by being near their fathers as they worked. He asks: “Is that clear?”

We nod.

For a brief period in the early 1990s, Robert Bly was the spokesperson of masculine loss. His book dissecting fairy tales for lessons on being a man, Iron John, was a best seller. His popularity was a strange feat for a poet from rural Minnesota. A poet who took a turn toward the Jungian or “mythopoetic” in the early 70s with his book Sleepers Joining Hands.

He interrupts this book of fierce anti-war poetry in its middle section with an essay where he proclaims that “we have within us two worlds of consciousness.” These are male and female. Light and dark. Wild and numb. Creative and dead. He uses ancient symbols and myths to explain the four poles of our female side which calls “mother consciousness”. Good and Death mothers on one axis. Stone and Ecstatic (or Teeth) mothers on another. He recounts the history of a great shift away from mother consciousness to father consciousness.

He is particularly interested in what men lost in this ancient transition to patriarchy.

He is particularly interested in what MEN lost in this ancient TRANSITION topatriarchy...

At the men’s retreat, Robert Bly told us that we were wounded. We were wounded by our fathers and mothers. We craved old-man energy and got nothing. Our fathers were turned into stone and lost all access to wildness.

What could our fathers teach us? They were already dead.

We had to look back ten thousand years into the mythical past and connect with our true fathers. We felt in our souls the pain of energetic, purposeful men who had been neutered by modernity. There, we found the warrior teachings our sad dads could not provide. We avoided the sickness of looking for such things from females, which was fraught with the peril of psychic death.

Is that clear?

In the gym, Bly instructed us to find a partner and place a hand on his heart. We were told to look deeply into the eyes of our partner. To see the spiritual, wounded man before us. My partner was a dentist from Seattle, at least twenty years older than me. I stared into his hero eyes and said, as instructed, “Tell me about your mother.” It was the first time I had ever spoken seriously to an older man.

Robert Bly’s Wonderfully Bizarre Ideas become Grunt, Grunt, Grunt

I am doomed to be alive in an era where each generation of American men endures a Tim Allen sit-com. In the early ‘90s it was Home Improvement. The sit-com version of Bly’s ideas was about men going to the woods and farting or shooting things or peeing off a cliff together or talking about tools or whatever it is that men do in the woods or in their sheds. Though I have been to the woods many times, I have not done so in the company of anything Tim Allen would recognize as a man. Except, perhaps, my brother who carried a six-pack of Bud Light twenty miles uphill in Olympic National Park. I cannot bring myself to watch Mr. Allen’s latest sit-com, but I assume he is still enacting a version of shallow masculinity.

Bly thought that the American masculinity once embodied by a grunting Tim Allen curdles into a nihilism and causes wars. It avoids emotion and introspection. It cuts itself off from the feminine and becomes a “fear of women” that Bly calls a “disaster.” The answer for men, according to Bly, was to confront that crazy Mother energy, to engage with it, to graft it onto our spirits. With his guidance, via his books, VHS tapes, and workshops, we could brave this path. (For all of Bly’s brilliance as a poet, he also knew how to move product.)

Look: Bly’s ideas were complicated, contradictory, and pretty nuts. But as I understood him, the project of our early 90’s men’s circles was becoming beautiful with kinetic mother energy. Following my gymnasium reverie, I met regularly with a group of older men in another Portland suburb, Gresham. There, in a ranch house front room, we enacted and confronted the wild moonlit feminine. We got access to the spiritual euphoria of mystic poets. We hugged. We became more complete men. Our host’s unseen wife provided brownies.

I, a Midwesterner like Bly, had never hugged grown men before. Alan was a burly Vietnam vet. I can feel his embrace, decades later. I think he saw me as his twenty-year-old self. The one who had been shipped overseas and thrown into the maws of the Teeth Mother. I made him cry. I was so skinny and naïve then. He knew what the world of men could do to a little blonde kid.

Our group did not want to become ancient warriors or paleolithic hunters. The project of the circle was to avoid the psychic death of the male-patriarch role as envisioned by 50s-era stereotypes. The public missed this piece of Bly’s message and went straight for the “warrior” stuff which in turn became a celebration of male aggression and emotional obliviousness. The sort of thing I imagine our most popular podcasters currently revel in. The warrior’s purpose in our little clan was to reclaim what had been stolen by the industrial age: a creative, chaotic feminine world closed off to men. To embrace our lost feminine consciousness was the only way to be a complete man in a technological society. `

Men Talking (not on a podcast, but together in a room)

Robert Bly was right, I think, about the loss of male relationships across generations. A loss that began with the modern age. At twenty years old, I had never been friends with, let alone had a serious conversation with, an older man who was not my father or a teacher. Until I sat down in that ranch house in Gresham, Oregon as the youngest member of a drumming circle, I had never spoken about marriage, war, drugs, love, money, sex, or fears with an older man. Our society has a peculiar insistence on generations as essential to our nature. As if being gen X, Y, Z, etc. is to be forever alienated from our fellow human beings just because they don’t happen to share a certain age range. All that generational rage has the effect of pulling us apart. Making boys susceptible to to the next men’s guru. And it’s likely that the next guru is not one who will encourage you to read Rumi and dance in the woods.

In the end, what Bly was saying was a lot of pop-Jungian hooey mixed with righteous anger at the modern world. I loved him. And then I outgrew him. Which is what men are supposed to do, I think, when they become who they are.

Bly, a charismatic but fairly innocuous men’s leader, is gone. He has been replaced with malignant, vein-popping a-holes. A certain rather large demographic slice of young American men needs someone to show them how to define that amorphous blob of a concept, man. The Rogans and Petersens and Musks and Trumps fling their butthurt version of misogynistic meanness at these pups. And the pups lap it up. Big Balls and his band of douchy brothers will be refusing your mom’s social security payment soon. In the past they might have had relationships with older men. Now they bathe in an endless YouTube garbage stream instead. If we can’t fill this void with actual men and not broken, lovesick babies, we’re going to get a generation of stormtroopers. To borrow another Jungian-myth inspired guru’s terms, Big Balls needs an Obi-Wan.