The star-spangled fantasyland of the fake and home of the bogus

[donsu]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1733675,00.html


US politicians aim for rugged, macho images because insecure voters want to feel that real men are in charge
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n America, the excitement about Dick Cheney's shooting accident is over. There are no more talkshow debates about why he took so long to make a statement, and no more news reports about his 78-year-old victim. Even the delicious contrast between the vicepresident's bravery in the face of small birds and the deferments he took to keep from going to Vietnam no longer raises eyebrows. Yet the shrewdest comment I heard on the incident was rarely touched on. What did the vice-president think he was doing, inquired a serious hunter? Real men got up early and went into the countryside hunting wild quail alone with their dog. Going in groups to a farm to shoot specially bred birds was for sissies. It wasn't Cheney's involvement in masculine pursuits that was noteworthy; it was that the mode of masculinity on show was bogus.

:)

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Partly because women in the US are better represented in the hierarchies, the culture wars over gender there have been particularly fierce. This can be seen in the ferocity of the debates over gay marriage, but also over far less serious things. It should, for instance, have come as no surprise that Brokeback Mountain, with its deconstruction of one of the most iconic American male heroes - the cowboy - did rather better at the Baftas in London than at the Oscars in Hollywood. For some Americans, I suspect, this movie was too uncomfortable, even heretical. It scratched at issues that were already irritating.

One way of understanding the bogus masculine posturing of the likes of Bush and Cheney is to view it as a kind of comfort blanket being knowingly extended to troubled American voters (of both sexes) who feel deeply worried that conventional gender roles in their country are unravelling. Male blue-collar workers, who have witnessed the disappearance in recent years of large numbers of conventional masculine jobs in heavy industry, and evangelical Christians concerned about the sanctity and survival of the family are particularly susceptible to such strategies on the part of knowing politicians, however crude and artificial they may seem to non-believers.

There is, however, another factor in play. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, politics remains overwhelmingly a male pursuit, but it is no longer necessary to try too hard. David Cameron could get away with simply patting his pregnant wife's bump, a New Man gesture that was also, of course, a gesture of proprietorship and potency. But Blair and he do not need to strut upon battleships, however much they might enjoy doing so. Britain, like other European states, is not and never will again be in the topworld- power league, so its male leaders can afford to play subtler, more variegated roles. Leaders of the US don't have that option. They preside over an empire, over the biggest military power the world has ever seen, which is now at war. The pressure on them to be seen to be conventionally masculine is therefore enormous. Just how Hillary Clinton in particular will cope with this in 2008 is not clear.
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Hillary knows they are only men. we have wiped their bottoms and showed them how to pee in the toilet