Is This The End Of The "Tough Guy"?



Unilateralism. Putin's instructional martial arts videos. McCain's hissing rage, calling Obama "that one!" Unregulated financial schemes devised by shithead finance types unravelling into disastrous messes. The world's muscles are coiled like a jungle cat and its fists are balled, knuckles screaming white, into adamantine knots waiting for the big ka-POW.

Overheated, to be sure. And now, in this hour of national exigency, these shameful McCain/Palin rallies, where fearless followers, nestled in the crowd, are actually shouting things like: "Kill him! (And whether the threats are directed at Ayers or Senator Obama is not clear, but the criminal intent is clearly obvious)"

Let's face it -- hyper-masculinity in the post 9/11 era has reached its natural conclusion. Finally. And not a moment too soon (The Corsair pours himself a tall, icy, cold glass of Madeira). We all need to cool the fuck out.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes passionately today in The Atlantic:

"Frankly, I've always believed that the quickest way to show you're a chump is to run around telling everyone about that aren't one. You want to prove to the American people that you aren't shook? Don't talk them to death. Get in the ring and kick the other guys ass. It's that simple. Screw all this talk about who's tougher than who. Here is what I know: McCain will talk that shit about Ayers and brag about taking the gloves off. He will send his wife and Sarah Palin out to do his dirty work. But when faced with the man who he believes 'palls around with terrorist' he played his position."

I, too, have never liked people needing to tell me how big and tough they were or are. That whole Us-versus-Them -- "they are either for us or their against us" -- world view of Manichianism suggests naught else but a simple mind. Their accents, when these types go in for that sort of thing, is brought low -- the "g's" are dropped at the ending of sentences. Their legs hang with a threatening cowboy-hunting-Injuns aspect (For further reference, see: paleo-bigot Pat Buchanan and stupid lefty Ward Churchill).

It is not so much cowardice, but a cacophonous insecurity that these asshole types reek of when they feel the need to talk about their toughness and threaten "the rough stuff" -- whatever that is -- at every opportunity, but often behind the security of a rowdy crowd at the ready for some fist-play (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

Mankind is at its rawest when we are insecure about our ability to make a living, secure our housing, or provide for our future. This is the WORST time for the McCain/Palin ticket to be stoking the fires, with primitive tools, playing after the limbic brain of voters. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man who's toughness served his intellect and not the other way round, called this scurrilous strategy "boob bait for Bubba."

There has been far too much Thumos, far too much aggressive hypermasculine stupidity, on display in these United States of America in these past seven and a half years. Obama's steady hand and inner calm, we believe, are making such a splash on the psychology of American voters in the closing days of this campaign because the people are is sick of all this "tough guy" shit.

Putting this issue in what commenter Mary calls "neighborhood language," she praises Joe Biden's fiery denunciation of McCain's increasingly guttural campaign tactic on the baseless Ayers/Obama's palling-around-with-terrorists charge. Said Biden today at a rally in in Missouri(via MSNBC's First Read):

"'All of the things they said about Barack Obama in the TV, on the TV, at their rallies, and now on YouTube ... John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him," Biden said this morning. "In my neighborhood, when you've got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.'"

Or, as it has often been said, "a real tough guy doesn't tell you how tough he is ... you just know." Senator John McCain may have been tough once, but his campaign at present is undisciplined, angry, reactive, fearful, pessimistic and, finally, erratic -- anything but tough, in other words.