“I’m Against Him” – Welcome To Cartoon Nation

The Rediscovery Of Men
This must account, at least in part, for the post-election hysteria among the social justice folk and their mentors at the Prog end of politics, especially those bent on suppressing or eliminating men. Of course, it’s only been the last year or so that their long-running animus became explicit, their writ against white men in particular. Before, it was all sub rosa, really just a byproduct of the campaign to uplift women, people-of-color, and the many theoretical gender categories vying for supremacy of the moral high ground. Hillary was expected to drive the final wooden stake through masculinity’s demonic heart… but something went wrong… and she was disarmed… and now this cheeto-headed monster in a red necktie is the president-elect. There must have been a clerical error.
Donald Trump was about as far from my sense of the male ideal as anything short of the Golem. His accomplishments in life – developing hotels that look like bowling trophies and producing moronic TV shows – seem as flimsy as the plastic golden heraldry plastered on his casinos. His knowledge of the world appears to be on the level of a fifth grader. He can barely string together two coherent sentences off-teleprompter. I was as astonished as anyone by the disclosure of his ‘grab them by the pussy’ courtship advice to little Billy Bush. In my experience, it seemed a very poor strategy for scoring some action, to say the least. In a better world – perhaps even the America he imagines to have been great once – Donald Trump would be a kind of freak among men, a joke, a parody of masculinity.
But then consider the freak show that American culture has become in our time and it shouldn’t be surprising that a cartoon nation has ended up with a cartoon of a man as head-of-state. In fact, I doubt that there even is any remaining collective idea of what it means to be a man here in terms of the ancient virtues. Honor? Dignity? Patience? Prudence? Fuhgeddabowdit. The cultural memory of all that has been erased. The apotheosis of Trump may remind a few people of all that has been lost, but we’re starting from nearly zero in the recovery of it.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Nov 28, 2016.

Comments are closed.