Who's Your Daddy Party

Sorry if this was already posted. I thought this was a good article.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11538

Like its religious counterpart, political liturgy does not reward literal interpretation. The “weakness” that invites our destruction is not a measurable, structural weakness of nations. It is more insidious than that. It is the weakness of men. Certain men of uncertain will. Unmanly men. Men who lack the grit and determination to command other men to expend their grit and determination in battle. Girly men. Men who snuggle before the domestic hearth of the Mommy Party. Men who fuss and fret over Mother Nature (when what she really needs is a good drilling). Men who wish to restrain the natural urges of natural men, to smother initiative and stifle competition beneath the suffocating pleats and ruffles of the Nanny State. Men who are effete. Men who cut and run. Men without guns or guts or glory. Men whose weakness abases and undermines the rugged individualism and frontier can-do that made the United States Numero Uno.

We have met the enemy. And he adores Judy Garland.

No matter what ideological hue he projects, whether conservatism, corporatism, idealistic imperialism, or his studied tracings of Ronald Reagan’s rugged sentimentalism, Bush has made manliness the centerpiece of his persona and his politics. Bush’s flight-deck performance aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln -- “Mission Accomplished” -- long ago became Esperanto for “hubris.” But as psychologist Stephen J. Ducat noted in his provocative book on masculine anxiety, The Wimp Factor, the event began as a ballsy celebration, first and foremost, of Bush’s manhood. Observing the President’s flight suit, which expressly accentuated his crotch, G. Gordon Liddy, the right’s uncensored id, noted: “It makes the best of his manly characteristic.”

We are in our sixth year of government by gonads. Through conscious, concerted, disciplined, and relentless effort, Bush and his party have succeeded in cowing critics and defeating Democrats by advancing images of, and insinuations about, manliness in the public sphere. In the Republican political schemata, this is a man’s world. Men have made it dangerous. And only men -- real Republican men -- can make it safe again.




The Reagan administration introduced the nation to War Wimps, that bellicose band of conservatives who so relish American wars (provided other Americans fight them). In prevailing against their liberal critics, the WW’s learned a valuable lesson: The public is more impressed by a politician’s aggressiveness in the present than by any failures to launch in the past. As a result, even the most unlikely tough guys began kicking up sand at the beach. Orrin Hatch, perhaps the Senate’s most fastidious prig, with a proclivity for French cuffs and pink ties, declared Democrats “the party of homosexuals.” Senator Trent Lott, who volunteered for cheerleading duty at Ole Miss but cartwheeled away when Vietnam beckoned, proclaimed of Republicans, “I think that we are the party of Mars.”

And everything to do with corruption, cheating, lying, relying on massive wealth advantages and controlling the media (and the electoral process, but that's back to cheating).

though the things you list are at least as important.

"Somebody's OVERCOMPENSATING..."

Granted, everything you said is also true. It does have everything to do with corruption, cheating, lying, relying on massive wealth advantages and controlling the media - and the electoral process. But I think their lust for power - that they achieve THROUGH those crimes you listed - stems from a deep sense of inadequacy. I think they WOULD rather be daddy than mommy, because daddy looks tough, and at the moment, has his cowboy swagger back (well, at least THIS week), and packed that package in the flight suit so it'd look big and virile and invincible. Remember the king who declared "L'etat c'est moi" - "I am the state." Furthermore, I spent a lot of time studying art history - art through the ages, through the millennia - art from the time of the scrawlings in the caves, from the earliest moments when humanoid realized he/she could make a mark on a surface and leave it there (leave your mark!) - and it was ALWAYS all about virility. Male invincibility. I mean, seriously! There were cave paintings depicting successful hunts where the hunter is clearly depicted with a very large and hard-to-ignore hard-on. With apologies to "The DaVinci Code," it's always been about the the "divine male." For many civilizations, if the king was a hotshot, had the best strut, the biggest gut, the biggest jewels, the biggest fur cloaks (look at a portrait of Henry VIII sometime - and note the HUGELY-imposing shoulders), the biggest palaces, the biggest armies, the lady with the biggest hair, etc., that meant the king's realm was the same way. Perhaps that's what motivated Saddam Hussein. Perhaps he thought the show you put on, if enough people believed it, would keep you invincible - which made him finesse the idea of having lots of WMDs to intimidate his opponents and keep them at bay. And the tougher a tough-guy he portrayed himself, the more he intimidated all the crazies and the sects and everybody shooting at everybody else in Iraq now. You don't hear more comments about "maybe it took a Saddam to keep a lid on the uproar we've now seen unleashed in Iraq" for nothing, you know. In my opinion, it all boils down to the psychology of the biggest dick. Decorum dictates that you do not unzip in public and show how much you've got. You do it metaphorically, letting all that other bad-ass stuff you got speak for you - or your "leader" as your surrogate and your representative. You got a contact high because your guy was the baddest of them all. It was like who was the biggest baddest don - with all the hangers-on around him. They all hang around him because he's demonstrably the biggest. The bully on the playground always has his posse. So if "our" would-be cowboy president swaggers around as though he's wielding his member like a lasso, that supposedly makes us vicariously feel better and more swaggering about ourselves.

My husband and I were talking about this just last night. He was adamant in his agreement. I asked about the tendencies we see in places like the so-called "Bible Belt" and elsewhere, where there are more conservative, old-fashioned views about the dominant male (the head of the household and the breadwinner) and the submissive female (the stereotypical Stepford wife who knows her subordinate place), where the man is king of his castle and the woman doesn't need to work to help pay the bills (Heaven FORBID she makes more than he does!) and shouldn't be taking a job a man with a family might need in the first place. Votes for the GOP in those areas, it seems to me, reinforce all of that. More people in those areas, of that mentality, DO gravitate to the GOP, which hyped itself as the go-kick-ass, we'll-keep-you-safer party and demonized the Dems for being appeasers and capitulators and soft on terrorism. "Soft" is almost always a feminine reference. The less-highly-evolved male is threatened by all that. Threatened by powerful women, especially. It goes against their deep-seated views about the almighty and MUST-BE invincible male. The republi-CONS understand this and feed it and exploit the shit out of it, and with these weenies who are so unsure of their own security and maleness, the chance to glom onto a heroic bad-ass male draws them like honey does flies. Think back to the Reagan mystique, too. And remember the ungodly, "kingly," never-ending, we're-puking-on-our-pageantry funeral when Reagan died? It's like so many Americans who may themselves be so insecure about their own claims to bad-assness will get a contact high, or a vicarious thrill, or a benefit once-removed, by pointing to their virile, manly, swaggering, bring-'em-on "leader" and doing a "what HE said!" or a fist-pumping "Woof! Woof!" It's all about who seems to have the biggest package. Indeed, wasn't it Tweety and that-guy-whose-name-rhymes-with-Vanity who gushed "look at the PACKAGE on him!" while watching bush parade around in his crotch-enhancing flight suit? It's all about the mystique of the biggest dick. In animal terms, he who dominates the pack is the alpha male - with the claim to the females and their pregnancies and the first bite of the freshly-killed carcass. And he has the biggest pack because the rest of 'em want to crowd around him, sensing that because he's a big bad-ass, they are, too, in his reflected glory.

Whatever.

Dang. Ran on again. Sorry about that...

K&R

Boy are we getting fucked.