Many societies have a coming-of-age ceremony for pubescent boys. In our own it usually revolves about hunting and smearing blood, though for less outdoorsy types it may consist of being screwed by an upperclassman. Henry S. Salt, who was horrified by the practice, offered some early 20th century examples—

On January 4, 1910, the Daily Mirror published an account of the "blooding" of the Marquis of Worcester, the ten-year-old son of the Duke of Beaufort. In a front-page illustration the child was shown with blood-bedaubed cheeks, holding up a dead hare for the hounds, while a number of ladies and gentlemen were smiling approval in the rear.

Here, again, is an extract from the Cheltenham Examiner of March 25, 1909, in reference to the "eviction" and butchery of a fox which had taken refuse in a drain.

"Captain Elwe’s two children being present at the death of a fox on their father’s preserves, the old hunting custom of ‘blooding’ was duly performed by Charlie Beacham, who, after dipping the brush of the fox in his own [sic] blood, sprinkled the foreheads of both children, hoping they would be aspirants to the ‘sport of kings.’ "

Presumably the blood in which the brush was dipped was that of the fox, not of Mr. Charles Beacham. But what a ceremony in a civilised age! One would have thought the twentieth-century sportsmen, even if they would not spare the fox, might spare their own children!

Mr. Salt's problem lay really in the misapprehension that he was living in a civilized age. Had he realized that he wasn't, he might have been grateful that some sort of symbolic substitution was available for the practices of war and murder.

Today too many of our politicians missed out on their coming-of-age ceremony (the blooding, not the screwing), which has left them feeling "not quite a man." This has had unfortunate consequences for the rest of us.

Stan of Feral Scholar makes the point that with the execution of Tookie Williams California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger finally "got his bones." Arnie killed so many people on screen; yet when it was time to go live, the ceremony must have been strangely unfulfilling. The passion just wasn't there.

Stan writes,

Arnold got his first kill. Arnold got his bones. But it wasn’t in ‘manly’ combat against a simplified nemisis like his cardboard characters on the big screen. It was done in the most cowardly and bureaucratic and banal way, with the victim taken carefully out of a cage, handled by nameless, faceless people, who strapped Tookie to a gurney and poured poison into his body through an 18-guage intravenous catheter.

The great Austrian ubermensch got his first kill thus, and he got himself a Black man, and it’s Arnold’s to own, because he alone had the power to stop this execution, knowing goddamn well that this man was no threat to society, and that the conviction that landed him in prison was questionable from the get. Arnold committed this passive murder because it was politically expedient… the same reason every one of these sack of shit governors sign death warrants. You can’t win elections if you are portrayed as unmanly, as a wimp, as someone afraid to end lives. The irony, of course, is that Schwarzenegger is going to lose his next election anyway for his gross imcompetence, and this was his one chance to salvage any real respect among future historians. But his image was more important than the hard life of this one human being.

Reminds me of Lance Price's claim in The Spin Doctor concerning Tony Blair and the invasion of Iraq. Price wrote in his diary—

I couldn’t help feeling TB [Tony Blair] was rather relishing his first blooding as PM, sending the boys into action. Despite all the stuff about taking action ‘with a heavy heart’, I think he feels it is part of his coming of age as a leader.

As a society we are badly in need of clinical anthropologists who can treat our leaders, prescribing perhaps a symbolic bloodbath. Has the profession been invented yet?