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History will notice -- even
if we are too chickenshit to face it now -- that the extraordinary turpitudes of US politics
today represent an unprecedented failure of
American manhood. It's everywhere and pervasive along the spectrum of party politics, as untruth is everywhere and pervasive in American life.
The Republican case is
too painfully obvious - Congressman Todd Akin being only
the latest buffoon from the vast red state flyover cultural wilderness of franchise food
and franchise thought to expose himself
as lacking the basic male decency
to defend womanhood against the consequences of
plain-and-simple rape. In Dixieland Republicanism - now a misty region-of-mind that extends
way beyond the old Confederate borders - you have the perfect confluence of sheer stupidity with the put-on, fake religiosity of men too weak to take
responsibility for their own actions. They can just pawn
everything off on Jesus:
the good, the bad, the mystifying,
the shameful. All the Republican men have to do is show up at the Nascar oval in time for barbeque. As for the courage of convictions, watch VP-designate Paul Ryan haul his mom
out before a crowd of
Florida retirees to prove
his allegiance to
Medicare and Social Security - two programs he would like
to dismantle - on top of the fact
that his mom is exactly
the sort of multi-millionaire who
a sane society would means-test out of receiving old-age support from the less fortunate taxpayers.
The Democratic party
case is more interesting
to me, being a life-long registered
Democrat, perhaps partly accounted for by my Manhattan Jewish upbringing. I was coming-of-age and paying attention when Lyndon B.
Johnson chose manfully to sacrifice the future
votes of all Dixieland - his home territory - by signing legislation aimed at resolving the unfinished business of the Civil War.
Even the fiasco of Vietnam that
followed the Civil Rights
years was acknowledged by many Democrats then in power as a tragic error. They had the courage of men conscious in crisis.
A perverse residue
of those Civil Rights years lingers on today in the campaign for gay marriage, which affects to be identical in substance, and which
is now, ironically, the only vector of action in Democratic politics inviting male valor - while it is also
a huge distraction from many far more pressing tribulations we
face, from resource scarcity to the well-being of
the only planetary ecosystem we call home. I say, ironically, because gay marriage represents an existential endeavor
that seeks to escape or nullify the fundamental tensions
of the two-sexed human
race. Like all things fashion-oriented, its essence is novelty, and the essence of novelty is that
its charms wear off. Sooner or later, the charm of being not quite a man and not quite a woman will seem
less than compelling to those not directly preoccupied by it. I bring it
up because the Democrats
have (foolishly) made it
the public's business to the exclusion of other things. So, for Democrats, the last remaining
imaginable act of male valor
in the arena of politics is to come out of the closet. Where else is
valor found in Democratic politics? What amount of valor has been attached to the act of fighting to reestablish the rule of law in American finance, upon which the fate of the nation truly
hangs?
None. Zero. Last week Mr. Obama's Department of Justice dropped its case against Goldman Sachs's CDO swindling operations - a case that was served up on a silver platter by the report from Senator Carl Levin's Senate subcommittee hearings. Not one lawyer in the
entire DOJ took a public
stand against that act of gross negligence. It's only the latest in a long
string of failures-of-nerve in the desperately needed rescue of legitimacy in
American affairs. Every agency head, every person in authority in Mr. Obama's government has evaded the
single-most pressing issue of our
time. From the center of power to the margins of power and everywhere
in between, real masculine courage is absent.
Where was valor
in the face of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, when some Democrat
in the two other branches
of government could have proposed a legislative remedy, even a constitutional amendment, to clarify the distinction between
the standing of citizens and corporations in wielding money as political
speech? Who in Obamaland
has asked Jamie Dimon to account for JP Morgan's missing $6 billion? And, of course, Jon Corzine is still
at large.
In fact, all the
male energies in American political
economy have been directed
lately in the service of a
one multifarious enterprise:
the support of fraud, which
includes the promotion of untruth,
the protection of the wicked, and the evasion of reality. That can only end badly as this vast cargo of lies passes through the event horizon of circumstance and sucks us into the unknown territory that lies beyond the fall of empire. You can be certain of this: genuine male energy will re-emerge
from the shadows and that energy will
re-engage the still unresolved tensions abroad in this land. When they do, anything can happen. For now, the election of 2012 remains a mere pussy riot.
The storm churning through the Gulf of
Mexico may remind us just how large and uncontrollable
the forces of nature are as the curtain rises on
the political season of a
grievously misled nation.
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