Martial arts that are designed for combat on a battlefield or for serious self protection are about crippling or (by preference) killing people. The training is designed to let you kill as quickly and efficiently as possible without mercy or hesitation.If it's comprehensive it will teach you how to hold it together so that you can keep killing people as long as necessary.
Much as we try to sugar coat it "combat martial arts" teach people how to do nasty brutal things without quite crossing the line into insanity or criminality. That's because combat is nasty and brutal and frequently breaks men's minds or removes all their inhibitions. It's not suitable for kids. It's not "fun for the whole family" unless you've got a really strange family.
Most people don't really want it no matter what they say.
And this I think is the core of the answer to Terry's OP. The fact is, the norms that most of us are socialized to take as the default conditions on our behavior, and the realistic visualization of using the techniques of TKD—or any of the TMAS—to shatter an attacker's windpipe, break his neck vertebrae or smash his abdomen with a knee strike while holding him in place, and possibly doing severe damage to his internal organs as a result—fits badly with our expectations of how we are going to live. The conditions of life we enjoy in the West do not make available a cultural cubbyhole where perpetrating such violence in the course of everyday life can fit comfortably.
Iceman I was over in Korea training in the seventies and what we trained was not this sport stuff. Remember my father tought while he was serving the Marine corp. Although you are right about Wade, there are others on this board that was in Korea training in those H2H combat style of TKD. I know I was never in the military officially but growing up on military basis all over the world and training in some of these places puts me in the same boat.
TKD & the way is it taught (& to whom it is taught) has changed. It is now a "family sport" that teaches discipline, & respect as it's reason it is taught to kids. Heck, "take TKD & get better grades" is often the selling point of more than a few schools.
And the reason for that, I think, is precisely the need to
find such a cultural niche where we can put our technical skill in MAs safely. Discipline for the kids, self-confidence for the timid, 'moving meditation' or spiritual guidance for those seeking such guidance, sport/spectacle for the competitive, physical fitness for the out-of-shape—all of them can provide a comfortable rationale for doing something whose fundamental purpose is so antithetical to the basic assumptions of our ordinary life.
Brad Dunne said:
If you produce one student that can carry on what you have learned and your love of the art then you are a successful instructor my friend!
As nice as you intend this statement to be, IMO it's flawed. Lets say that everything about that statement rings true, what happens if for any number of reasons, that student dosen't or can't carry on, then what happens to the knowledge and or the discipline in general?
As a martial artist (not a black belt) it is incumbent on us, to practice and learn what you are lamenting about
If it's not taught, then how can anyone learn or practice, what's being lamented about?
The masters learned that the scope of their arts are not just about killing, or as you have focused on H2H, that is why they changed the names of their arts from jitsu to Do.
The "Do" was part of the name TKD, before all this transition came about. The Masters learned that sport = money here in the states and inturn, many became business men instead of real teachers.
I agree with Brad that the
Do vs.
Jutsu nomenclature isn't—in itself—really significant in how the art is applied or thought of. The art that the Kwan founders took back from Japan translated as
tang soo do and
kong soo do in Korean—
do in both cases; we all know that these were just literal translations of
karate, and that the fearsome fighting techniques applied by the ROK infantry in two horrific wars constituted applications to military purposes of these
do systems. The fact that they were described via
Do didn't make them one bit less destructive to the North Korean and North Vietnamese communists. But I think it's also important to recognize that it's true: if we want that hard aspect of the MAs to persist, we have to teach it, and make it available to those whose interest in the MAs is primarily personal self-protection. That will always be a small minority of MA students, for the reasons I've tried to sketch above. But they are there, and are willing to train hard in the use of these combat systems against violent assailants. Attracting these people is the best way to ensure that an effective H2H SD version of the art survives.
What I'm saying, I think, is that the sport/spectacle 'deflection' of the original SD purpose of the MAs is itself a symptom of something deeper, one we probably don't like to think of too much: the basic badness of fit between, on the one hand, traditional MA arts geared for damaging effect in unarmed personal combat, and on the other, the expectations of the consumers of training in those arts in the late 20th/early 21st century western world. Those of us who view MAs as brutally effective survival tools first and foremost are always going to be in the great minority. We'd better get used to it and just try to carry on with our vision of what these MAs can do if you're ever unfortunate enough to have to fight for your life.
