MAGA manhood? A book by our leading national pipsqueak on being a man.

Voiced by Don Draper himself

 

Hawley Slammed For Using Fake Founding Father Quote To Push Christian Nationalism On July 4

 

Constructing a fake history to confirm a preferred present - why that man is ready for the high Court!

 

pos fos m o u s e

 

Hawley tweeted last week that his wife, Erin, litigated the web designer case that SCOTUS just ruled upon. I'm not saying that she did anything improper because I don't know. Could be a coincidence but perhaps his tweet was an effort to get the spotlight off of his wife? Would be interesting to ask him where he got his quote.

 

Virginia Heffernan with a thoughtful mini essay on the current “crisis in manhood” that Hawley and company seek to address. Short take: disruption in the social hierarchy creates status stress over the feared inability to take one’s rightful place, leading to false nostalgia and the desire to reclaim some contrived uniquely American pioneering conquering spirit informed by American exceptionalism evangelical Christianity


For the rest of us, the source is harder to pinpoint. Americans, in all of our dizzying ideological and cultural diversity, are always anxious to nail down a self-definition. Being 336.7 million people without a national language or religion, of whom only 9.7 million have indigenous ties to the land, evidently just doesn’t cut it when you’re looking for an identity. So some people find a tight bond in their maleness, even while the definition of manhood stays always in flux.

Bushwhacking through the thicket of these circular arguments is, in the end, highly unpleasant. While masculinity philosophers aim to project supreme confidence, their terms slip and slide. An undefined catastrophe is always in the offing, though the evidence for the crisis keeps changing.

From almost the moment they arrived, American men of European descent have taken pains to pretend they belonged here, that this country was theirs, that they’d been here all along. Perhaps that’s why male elites, bent on seeming powerful and somehow “native” to America, tend to romanticize the parts of America that are least like Europe — the plains, the ranches, the Appalachians, the Ozarks. But somehow, at a certain age, they also keep heading like moths to a flame to Cambridge, New Haven and Palo Alto, where, around the broad oak seminar tables, they can all agree that, while the rest of their classmates are ivory tower sissies, they themselves are rough riders at heart.

 

Just call him Josh Hollis accidentally on purpose.

 

“Real men” or just good people in general don’t have to explain what they are. They prove it with examples.

Over my 70 years on this earth I’ve learned to be vigilant of those that speak it rather than live it.

Talk is cheap and often a facade to hide the truth.

My 2 cents

 

Nothing more manly than getting together in a support group to whine about not being manly.

Josh, the son of a bank executive, went to an elite prep school whose alumni include dozens of pro athletes, tons of celebrities like Jason Sadukis, Spencer Tracy, Robert Altman, and politicians like Tim Kaine… before going to an even more elite place, Harvard then Yale. Yep. Salt of the earth.

 

Talk about your bootstrap feel good story.