Glenn Greenwald on manliness and the right wing

[illinoisprogressive]

Greenwald has to be one of my favorite writers online. he is not only a great writer but, is so spot on in his thinking about the foibles of the right.
this guy is a gifted writer with a keen insight and perception.
i highly recommend anyone wanting to read well done political commentary to check him out.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/14/matthews/index.html



Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that -- literally in almost every case -- the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.

snip

And this is what causes someone like Jonah Goldberg -- who needs no description -- to explicitly invoke the fear of being the kid who gets bullied in middle school as a rationale for starting wars, or to urge that "the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." And it's what spawns someone like Victor Davis Hanson devoting himself to celebrating the Glories of Manly Warfare and to attacking the effete weakness of academics, even though he has never been near military service and has spent most of his career as a Classics Professor at California State University at Fresno. And it is what subjects us to hearing people like James Taranto mock John Edwards for being insufficiently masculine. And on and on and on.

In the 1990s, this mentality manifested as the relatively innocuous trend whereby middle-aged men left their wives at home to go dress up in military costumes and march around on the weekend play-acting as "militia" comrades or, relatedly, as not merely advocates of gun rights, but as worshippers of guns themselves. But now -- really, ever since the 9/11 attacks so frightened so many of them and made them feel, to use Rush's formulation, as though they were besieged by "The Emasculating of America" -- this mentality has come to dominate our political culture, as those who so plainly perceive themselves (understandably) to be lacking the traditional masculine virtues degrade and exploit our political system in order to satisfy those cravings.

snip

PDATE II: George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, describing hysterical war propaganda about The Enemy (h/t Robert Waldmann):

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

It is difficult to describe our tough-guy, faux-masculine warriors any better than th