For every Jean Frenette (theres a name from the past, whatever happened to that guy?) or george chung, or Clohe Bruce tho, there are 1000 people that think a backflip makes up for a crappy backstance.
To me, this is the real problem—because of what it leads to in the MA marketplace.
I'm not interested in XMA at all, but not because there's anything inherently wrong with XMA itself—it's just a matter of taste, like enjoying tennis but having no interest in golf, or whether you prefer French to Chinese cooking, or vice-versa. The problem is not with XMA itself, but with the effect of the role of XMA in the marketplace. Markets don't just reflect taste; they also have a major role in
creating taste. The way something is marketed, the 'weight' behind the marketing, has a big effect on people's perceptions; those perceptions translate into buying behavior, and you wind up with a self-perpetuating process that can lead to the domination of a particular product, or a particular
idea of what the product should be like. I remember, some years back, seeing that Discovery Channel special on XMAs, and one of the things that struck me was the way the voice background guy intoned—twice or more, IIRC—that 'Craig Henningsten is the future of Karate'. I wondered at the time, why the hell is this
particular kid the future of karate? There are probably thousands of kids out there who are technically as good—why him? But of course, the reason is that he's the next generation of Matthew Mullins' Sideswipe project and Mike Chat's vision of the MAs—
that's why, according to the Discovery Channel, Craig H is so important: the special was pushing that particular kind of activity as the next logical step in the development of Karate. Not the revival of Karate as realistic self defense, not the new wave of detailed bunkai studies and reconnection with the Okinawan roots of the kata as keys to that revival, but the continuuous conversion of martial movements into extreme gymnastic performances. And the more the media promote that idea, the greater weight it has in coloring future participants' idea of what the MAs are all about, and the more it becomes important for MA schools to cater to that idea that the MAs are about martial
spectacle rather than CQ fighting techniques. Which means, in the end, it gets harder and harder to find instruction in the MAs which stresses the latter, rather than the former. But what if the latter is what you want to study?
I have no problem with MAs as being big tents under which street self-defense, sport competition and 'martial acrobatics' all coexist... in principle; but it's unlikely to work out like that, nice as it would be if it did. Chloe Bruce may be an outstanding technical MAist; certainly Matt Mullins and Mike Chat both are. But what TF says in his post is true, and even more than that, eventually, the glitzification of TKD, Karate and other fighting arts will wind up leaving us all in the place where Chinese government-sanctioned Wushu already is. Flying Crane, one of our members, has written some excellent posts about this: the danger is that it will, one day, become almost impossible to find actual combat-oriented CMA instruction—the current regime certainly seems to be pushing in that direction. What worries me is that ultimately the other TMAs will wind up following suit, with TKD as Korean wushu, Karate Japanese wushu, and so on. I think we've already gone far enough in that direction that it's hard to find a dojang or dojo which emphasizes the SD component of those arts, or even gives it more than superficial lip service—and XMA is, I'm convinced, just another factor driving that tendency even faster. It's both a sign of, and a contributor to, something that doesn't bode well for instruction emphasizing the combat applicability of the MAs.
