Government by Gonads

By Francis Wilkinson, The American Prospect. Posted June 1, 2006.

"Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness."

President George W. Bush has made that statement many times. So has Vice President Dick Cheney. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Multiple principals endlessly repeating themselves -- that's the mark of a premium White House talking point. Or in this case, a kind of gospel -- poll-tested, market-driven, swing-voter-approved, and sanctioned by Kardinal Rove himself.

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."

With the rise of Bush, Cheney, and Rove (WW's all), the bully boy behavior reached new heights. The one resounding message Republicans have deployed -- over and over and over -- since September 11 is that Democrats are weak. And we all know terror attacks are invited by the perception of weakness. What's more, virtually every subsidiary Republican attack -- from gay marriage (Homosexual Party) to taxes (Nanny Party) to abortion (whatever you say, dear) -- has exploited traditional gender stereotypes and reinforced the theme of Democratic wimpery.

For three straight elections, from 2000 through 2004, Republicans have outmanned the Democrats. Al Gore was dismissed as a hectoring schoolmarm, John Kerry as a flaky croissant, a kept man, a tin soldier. In between, Bush made no bones about the price of Democratic pusillanimity: Under its brief Democratic majority, he said, the U.S. Senate was simply "not interested in the security of the American people." And with another Election Day approaching, and their party depleted of both issues and credibility, the Republicans will no doubt seek to emasculate the opposition once again. But the testosterone is no longer flowing like $75 crude. Multiple mission failures have exposed Republican talking points as so much bluster. To underscore the farce, the gods of metaphor illustrated the tragic potential of power placed in irresponsible hands; after his beer-and-hunting nightmare in Texas, Vice-President Bottom awoke with an ass's head on his shoulders.

Now, rising out of the broken-back shamble of Republican machismo, is a veritable platoon of Democratic men. They have exceptionally macho profiles and an appetite for power. They are politically diverse but united in their contempt for the bully in the pulpit. They are fed up with schoolyard put-downs. They are disgusted by incompetence and callousness. And they are running for Congress.

Francis Wilkinson is a communications consultant and speechwriter in Nyack, New York.

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