{"id":4968,"date":"2017-09-27T07:00:15","date_gmt":"2017-09-27T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fightfast.com\/blog\/?p=4968"},"modified":"2021-04-01T16:09:18","modified_gmt":"2021-04-01T16:09:18","slug":"aggression-handles-by-mark-hatmaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/27\/aggression-handles-by-mark-hatmaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Aggression Handles by Mark Hatmaker"},"content":{"rendered":"Pop Quiz: <strong><em>What do the following have in common?<\/em><\/strong>\n<ul type=\"disc\">\n \t<li>Early UFC-Phenom Kimo Leopold<\/li>\n \t<li>Fortune 500 Power Suits<\/li>\n \t<li>My Great-Grandfather, Jerry Harber<\/li>\n \t<li>Cargo Shorts<\/li>\n \t<li>Frenchmen in the court of France's King Louis XVI<\/li>\n \t<li>And hockey jerseys<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAs the title tips, the common theme is <strong>handles.<\/strong><!--more-->\n\nLet's start with my great-grandfather Jerry Harber, a man I never had the opportunity to meet.\n\nMy great-grandfather, dug coal (<em>along with his sons and my grandfather, George Washington Goins - gotta love that name!<\/em>) in the mines at Rocky Station in Lee County, Virginia.\n\nWe all know coal-mining was and is a tough dangerous job.\n<h5 class=\"red\">January 13, 1941<\/h5>\nIn the tight-quarters of minework space is at a premium and in a tragic few moments, my great-grandfather moving in a squeeze, had one of his pantlegs get caught in a large drill-mechanism. The drill seized the fabric of the pants and fed up the leg until the gears latched onto his belt.\n\nDesperate efforts to release him (<em>some of his sons among the attempted rescuers<\/em>) were to no avail. The drill, with a cut-off switch far down the line, was unable to be stopped in time and Jerry Harber was beaten to death against the wall of the mine due to the fluke of a pantleg being caught. (<em>Big tip of the hat to my mother Sue Hatmaker for running down the tragic details for me.<\/em>)\n\nNow, less morose matters, that French history reference.\n\nManners, fads, fashions, being unpredictable and mostly impractical beasts saw the court of Louis XVI filled with men wearing elaborate finery and sporting long hair which they tied into queues (a braided ponytail in today's parlance.)\n\nMarechal de Saxe (<em>Maurice, Count of Saxony<\/em>) was an esteemed and valorous German soldier who became the Marshall General of France. He was a man of practical military mind. He viewed the fashionable queue as a mistake; in fact, he deprecated it dearly declaring it dangerous in war, as it provided a handle to the enemy.\n\nFlash-Forward to the 1990s and the second advent of Mixed Martial Arts competition. We saw more than a few quite able fighters either scuttle their chances inside the cage or at least hamstring them with the sporting of long hair within a competition where grabbing long-hair was permitted; as a badly shaken Royce Gracie exploited with the aforementioned Mr. Leopold.\n\nThe Count's lesson, on one hand, is simple, any of us could make it without the benefit of his vast military experience, and yet, look around us \u2014 <em><strong>how many of us heed this advice?<\/strong><\/em>\n\nHow many of us are able to step outside the unpredictable vagaries of fashion and forgo what might prove problematic in times of distress?\n\nA good look around proves that most of us would rather \"fit in\" than be fit for battle.\n\nLet's see if you fall into any of these categories.\n<ul type=\"disc\">\n \t<li>Do you wear a necktie?<\/li>\n \t<li>Carry a purse, backpack, laptop bag with a strap slung over a shoulder?<\/li>\n \t<li>Do you wear a loose jacket, coat, hoodie when weather does not dictate such measures?<\/li>\n \t<li>Do you wear loose, baggy cargo shorts or ultra-low riding capacious pants of any sort?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nWhile we're discussing perhaps less than utilitarian fashionable choices:\n<ul type=\"disc\">\n \t<li>Do you wear flip-flops or other less than ideal footwear? (<em>Mea culpa.<\/em>)<\/li>\n \t<li>While we're flogging this horse: Do you wear high-heels?<\/li>\n \t<li>Gents, let's flog that horse again, do you wear slick-soled dress-shoes?<\/li>\n \t<li>How about wallet chains or suspended keyrings?<\/li>\n \t<li>Is your belt for fashion or utility?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIn short, a head-to-toe inventory of what we commonly choose to wear backed with an assessment question of <strong><em>\"Is this a combat handle for a predator?\"<\/em><\/strong> will go a long way to cure what possibly ails.\n\nThese questions are not meant to discourage us from following the fun of fashion, or dressing up now and again. There is no urging here to go all American Indian, as many warring tribes stripped nude (<em>hence the term <strong>\"buck naked\"<\/strong><\/em>) before battle\u2014even in the dead of winter to provide zero handles to enemies.\n\nWhat we are seeking to do with these questions is to at least awaken ourselves to the fact that like Kimo's ponytail, Leonardo DiCaprio's man-bun, or the queues of the court of Louis the XVI, we all provide handles.\n\nFew of these handles are truly necessary.\n\nWith that in mind, we must assess our balance between \"<em>Hmm, perhaps fewer neckties worn is a good idea<\/em>\" and \"<em>To hell with it, I look good in a man-bun.<\/em>\" (Probably not.)\n\nSo, what's your handle?\n\n<a style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fightfast.com\/ar\/IE-k.php\">Click here for more self defense instruction from Mark Hatmaker<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pop Quiz: What do the following have in common? Early UFC-Phenom Kimo Leopold Fortune 500 Power Suits My Great-Grandfather, Jerry Harber Cargo Shorts Frenchmen in the court of France&#8217;s King Louis XVI And hockey jerseys As the title tips, the common theme is handles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4968"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12845,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4968\/revisions\/12845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}