MY WAR MY WAY

                         MY WAR, MY WAY!!

     The back of the boxer’s old beat up Chevy says it all:  MY WAR, MY WAY!! It declares as it delivers a blast of pollutants while racing through the yellow, soon to be red, light straight ahead.  Well, actually, the Chevy had a few other things to say from the back windshield:  RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!!  Ah, a vehicle of few words to be sure.  But such eloquence and expression in those few words!  This is Paul “The Talon” Henderson’s machine, and it betrays the driver’s attitude of nonconformity and macho individualism from bent and angry bumper to scratched and dinged-up front end.  The artistry on Paul’s hell-bent vehicle clearly portrays the ideology that one must be willing to fight and to openly display anger and contempt at times in order to obtain certain things in life.  In other words, one must be willing to stand for something of fall for anything.  This is a very common ideology amongst competitive athletes and especially amongst boxers, who are known to hang out for hours on end in moldy adrenaline and sweat filled gymnasiums trash-talking each other and pounding heavy bags with savage ferocity.  Indeed, the boxer not only fights to live, but lives to fight.  In the eyes of the warrior, life is often a war, but that war is waged on his terms—that is, the outcome is determined by him, for better or for worse.  The warrior declares his independence from the “machine” of “conventional” society.  The irony here is that even though these attitudes are commonplace among boxers and athletes, it must be acknowledged that these “diehard combatants” are in fact renegades.  They exist primarily in a subculture.  Since this is the case, what is “commonplace” to them is often seen as rebellious, hostile, and antisocial to the mainstream populace.  They become figures of controversy, and yet, ironically enough, they also become figures of envy.  They are looked at and depicted as strong, courageous, resilient, and resourceful…and a certain “mystique” envelops them.  This type of “dynamic separation” often occurs if a commonplace is not common enough.  In a very real sense, the more the “majority” (I will call this the “machine”) consolidates, the more the “minority” will deviate in order to express its individuality. This in turn can result in the majority consolidating all the more.  The snowball grows larger as it gathers momentum.  We now have a virtual “tug-of-war” going on which can result in very distinct political factions, demonology, and various other hostile relations and misunderstandings amongst human beings.