Top Five Most Badass Guys Ever

I like badasses. People who don’t give a f*^k and do cool stuff without pretense or expectation.  They don’t follow a formula, they usually just go with their gut and do whatever their situation requires. That’s what a badass is. I’m not putting actors on this list, like Steve McQueen, because I don’t think they’re real badasses. They just pretend to be.  The following five people are ones who I think were actually the most badass ever.

5) Charles Lindbergh.  I learned about how badass he was from Pawn Stars.  Before watching Pawn Stars, I thought Charles Lindbergh was just a run of the mill pilot who flew his little plane across the ocean. However, Rick Harrison on Pawn Stars said that he was only able to do what many others had tried before…but they died in the process. He was the Pilot who Lived. Charles Lindbergh said, “I don’t give a f*^k, I’m gonna fly that plane!” Even though he named his plane the “spirit of St. Louis” which sounds kind of lame, I guess he was pretty cool. Cheers to Mr. Lindbergh.

Yeah, I am pretty cool.

4) Giles Corey. So the puritans (or whoever it was who killed witches back in the day in Salem) decided to crush Giles Corey until he confessed to being a witch.  This was because they could only confiscate his sizeable property from his family if he confessed.  They put a lot of rocks on top of him and every time they told him to confess, he just looked at them and said, “more weight.”  F*&k you, witch hunters!

More f*&king weight.

3) Leonidas.  The movie 300 pretty much summed up this one.  He was one of the most badass guys around.  The Persians were coming and tried to take over Sparta.  Leonidas only had 300 men because the Powers that Be in Athens didn’t want to help him and his Spartan homies out.  Luckily, there were no whiny little bitches in Sparta.  Leonidas took his three hundred best guys to the straights of Thermopolyae and fought the Persians off with his bear hands.  Arguably, this was influential in preventing the Persian takeover of the western world.  Only Spartan women had Spartan men, though!

Get those prissy hands off me, bitch.

2) Edward Teach a.k.a Blackbeard the Pirate. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Teach since my grandparents took me to the Outer Banks when I was a child.  It was there where I bought a book about Blackbeard and I read every word of the pirate tome, fascinated by Blackbeard’s exploits. This guy just didn’t give a damn about anything except money, fornicating, and inciting fear in everyone else.  He formed pirate gangs, blockaded whatever port he wanted to, and killed and took with abandon. He put dynamite in his beard to scare people, for crying out loud.  Blackbeard was the kind of badass the rest of us can only dream about. Let’s pour some out for Edward Teach.

I do what I want.

1) Tich Quang Duc. Buddhists were being terribly persecuted by the Roman Catholic governent and no-one was doing anything about it. No one seemed to care about the atrocities enacted against the Buddhists until Tich Quang Duc lit himself on fire in protest at the intersection of Phan Đình Phùng Boulevard and Lê Văn Duyệt Street in Saigon.  His story is so incredible to me that he has to be the most badass dude ever. Tich was a Buddhist monk who had so much control over his mind and body that he burned himself to death without moving a muscle in protest of the persecution his religion faced.  After the act, worldwide attention was turned to the situation in South Vietnam and the Roman Catholic government was eventually toppled. Unfortunately a lot of Tibetans are self-immolating too in protest of the Chinese government’s treatment of their country.  This is not getting a lot of media attention. We should all be grateful that we live in a society where this type of action is not needed to bring about the changes we seek. Hat’s off to Tich Quang Duc.

Respect.