VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN MALE LIFE HISTORIES Our constructions of "reality" convince us, a bit too easily, that violence is an essential feature in the lives of American males and as "natural" as is the history of violence in the founding of our nation. The same constructions sponsor the myth of gender, allowing us to contend that women are naturally less violent than men. We are socialized in the United States to be gullible, to be worshippers of under-examined truths and full-blown lies. This seems to be our fate, our destiny, our normalizing of cowshit and bullshit . We can imagine relatively violence-free male visions, as did Clifton Taulbert in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and subsequent installments of his autobiography, but the aesthetics of hubris retard our doing so. The American majority has an unholy, acquired taste for the sounds of explosions and gun-fire and the lurid patterns of blood leaking...
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