Letters to the Editor
-
Pea-cocks
I think Glen is really on to something here.
The extreme right has historically flirted with a faux, over puffed-up masculinity
Think about cross dressing Nazi’s
Mussolini’s obsession with uniforms
Torture… and getting off on it
The sexual implications of unchecked power
Strutting pompous fascists on parade
The suppression of women
All of these things point to a lack of masculine confidence and over compensation
I hope Glen draws some historic parallels in his book.
Now on a lighter note I’d like to know…
Girls… how many times did you have to fake it with a Republican?
-
The Hemingway Complex
You had the best title within the words of your post: "Hemingway complex."
These desk jockeys all picture themselves as Ernest Hemingway, carrying out macho activities and writing about them later. Only they leave out the actual carrying out.
They fancy themselves Hemingway-esque he-men, but it is all a pitiful fantasy. Unfortunately, real armed service personnel have to live out their fantasies, real animals have to suffer from global warming while they fantasize being the Great White Hunters.
As I said, pitiful.
-
SusanMc
Gracias.
-
Karen M........you're right
Karen you wrote:
So, are we now to think that all of those who are complaining about the unfairness of posting Hemingway's photo-- because looks do not really reflect character-- will also complain every time they come across a "gratuitous" image of a woman of any age, body-type or degree (or not of) sex appeal. There are so many to choose from... plastered every where in our world every day.
I agree, you are correct.
Glenn was still wrong to post the guy's picture. His writing skills are way to advanced to need to go there.
-
al123
Glenn was still wrong to post the guy's picture. His writing skills are way to advanced to need to go there.
-- al2323
When someone posts flirt stuff on a dating internet site and misrepresents who and what they are they will be called out on it, as well they should be. "Hemingway" was misrepresenting himself by acting all Clint Eastwood 'Good the Bad the Ugly' when he is in fact not at all what he claims to be. Sorry if it is hard for you to come to the realization that 'looks matter' when someone misrepresents themselves, but they do, especially when lies are being told. If "Hemingway" hadn't called someone a Sissy Mary his not so cool looks would not be an issue. One has to put things in the perspective established by the players in question.
-
Title
How the Conservative Attack Dog "YOU'RE GAY!" wins elections
As usual, excellent article and comments.
-
Revised suggestion
Book Title Suggestion
How about:
The Republican's Cynical Alchemy
How the GOP makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners
-- pmorlan
I posted the above title yesterday but thought of some variations on the title.
A Cynical Alchemy
How the GOP Turns Losers into Political Gold.
Or
A Cynical Alchemy
How the GOP turns losers into winners and winners into losers.
-
Karen M
An Op-Ed in today's NYTimes is relevant to some of the points you have been making in this thread. Susan Faludi provides a preview of her upcoming book "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America":
A defining aspect of this cultural re-engineering was the upending of a gender history that had proved deeply humiliating to men. Time and again, leaders and militias had failed to protect and redeem women and their children. Of female colonists seized in New England and taken to Canada from 1689 to 1730, more than a quarter — and a whopping 60 percent between the ages of 12 and 21 — never came home.
Early American male defenders had suffered the further mortification of hearing female captives (Mary Rowlandson among them) disparage their protective efforts gone awry or, worse, recount how they managed to defend themselves. Rowlandson negotiated shrewdly with her captors and named her own ransom. Hannah Duston, abducted as she lay in bed recovering from childbirth (while her husband fled), escaped after killing a family of Indians with a hatchet and taking their scalps.
In response to this shame, the new model exaggerated iron-clad valor on the part of white men and crinoline helplessness on the part of white women. Thus was born the dime-store melodrama in which manly heroics always save the girl in jeopardy.
Faludi then goes on to point out how the response to 9/11 mirrored this response to the attacks on the early colonists:
Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.
Like the cultural imagineers before them, our post-9/11 press, entertainers and political spin doctors set to work to prop up our sense of virile indomitability — “the return of the manly man” and a reconstituted “John Wayne masculinity” were on every media lip, as the triumphs of torture-prone Jack Bauer heroes were on every TV.
I think I'll be buying this book.
Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/opinion/07faludi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
-
Book Title
Searching for Ronald Reagan: The Right’s Fixation on Heroic, Tough-Talking Caricatures
Keep after 'em Glenn. This is consistent with your long-stated view that ignoring these clowns and taking the high road doesn't always work out too well. The right-wing has been pulling this stuff for years, and I imagine when they went after a Supreme Court judge, that about did it for you, knowing your legal background. It is gratifying to see them, after about two decades of this crap, whining about your baseness for this one piece.
-
I love him, I love him, I love him, and where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow, he'll always be my true love...
@Andy Kern: the "My Guy" thing is RIGHT ON; it is exactly how these RightWing blowhards feel about their Dear Leader
Re Title: I want to reiterate that as attractive as "Codpiece Conservatives" or "Codpiece Conservatism" are, whether or not GWB actually wore a codpiece in the flight suit is relevant. If he didn't, I wouldn't vote for using "codpiece" in the title. Because you don't want to have to open your book with some typical liberal namby-pamby "nuance" about 'it is irrelevant whether or not he actually wore a codpiece for that picture; it is about the larger point blah blah blah'. Immediate turnoff. The point of this tactic is to fight fire with fire, to come out strong, no qualifications or clarifications. Just a swift boot to the head. (Btw though I normally love your nuance, but as you yourself have argued in defense of this post, there is a time for logic and reason, and there is a time for putting up his picture and saying "you call THAT manly?"... I think that's in Ecclesiastes somewhere.)
I do love the stuff about "Macho, Macho Men" and the idea of pictures of GWB in his flight suit, in his cowboy outfit, with his bullhorn on 9/11, all his great manly photo ops; i.e. a montage of him looking like the village people; but the only problem is the book isn't really about HIM per se; the best examples come from the RW media flaks who sell and support him.