Why I Hate Fencing

Gunnora Hallakarva gunnora at bga.com
Sun Nov 17 19:16:38 PST 1996


You know Lyonel, what I like about you is that you not only have two grains
of sense, you rub them together occasionally and like a good Boy Scout use
them to (hopefully) spark the fires of intelligent thought in others.

Although if your view is correct that prejudice is the #1 reason for banning
fencing, then I would expect those who hold the prejudice to fight tooth and
toenails to prove "it ain't so" and to show you on any number of counts why
you must be wrong.  Nothing is meaner than a cornered person with a
prejudice, especially when you're trying to pry their strange little notions
out of the dark recesses of their fevered brains and expose them to the
light of rational examination.

I think that if people have problems with fencing on a *safety* issue, then
the normal thing to do would be to examine how it may be made safer, not to
ban it outright.  As I recall, when forearms kept getting busted in
chivalric combat (there, Lyonel, there's an alternative term to the
mud-wrestling championship-related "heavy fighting") the marshallate
conferred and finally decreed that all would henceforth wear rigid
vambraces.  No one suggested that we should (1) ban chivalric combat, (2)
use safer weapons, or even (3) train our fighters not to throw up a forearm
to block a shot.

I can understand why no one sought to train the rapier fighters nor the
rapier marshalls about safety issues... training is always the course of
absolute last resort for any human activity.  Technology (in the form of
improved weapons or armor in this case) is almost always the first course of
remedy.  Banning an activity is not one of the range of responses our simian
ancestry decrees.... as human primates, we ALWAYS want to tinker with a
problem to fix it. 

Prejudice is the single explanation which I have seen offered which best
fits the facts for why fencing has been banned in Meridies and elsewhere.
Heinlein was right.  People just don't go a law-making body and say "I have
this terrible habit, please pass a law to save me from myself."  Nope, it's
always the Righteous who come and say "This activity is bad and makes one
morally unfit:  therefore take ye up your pens and make ye a law against it,
so that all might become righteous like myself."  I think that the Crown of
Meridies is feeling pretty Righteous even as we "speak."

Some thoughts...

Wassail,
::GUNNORA::


Gunnora Hallakarva
Herskerinde
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