Fascinoma

Recently I've been on about the psyche of the self-described conservative, and I must admit that nearly every day brings fresh evidence for my hypothesis that the whole movement is just a hypercompensating reversion to the Cult of Masuculinity. Jane Hamsher wonders here at length about the strangely numerous closet cases tumblingout of the GOP. I'll add to this a retiterated speculation that many "conservatives" like the role, precisely because it is so counterfeit. The things embraced by the Ditto Heads, anti-intellectualism, mouth-breathing superstition, trillion-dollar rolls of the geopolitical dice, micromanaging of private morality, et cetera, et cetera, are so completely antithetical to any historical sense of "conservative" in history as to make that self-identification a falsehood. It's an act that they semi-consciously put on, half aware that they are not the thing they pretend to be. I suspect that there is a transgressive charge in this synthetic identity -- rather like the cross-dresser's, or perhaps more precisely like that had by the self-styled macho man who secretly wears women's panties through the workday.

If ever there was a textbook example of a chest-beating manly-man, with a whole lot of unresolved gender-indentity issues, it is fascist blogger Kim du Toit. His Pussification of the Western Male, recently in the running at Washington Monthly for Worst All-Time Blog Entry, is the quintessence of this self-blind delusionality. As I already said elsewhere, it would make fine foddder for a psych Intro Lecture. Even the densest sophomore would be hard pressed to miss its brute dysfunction. I would title the lecture Boy Named Sue Syndrome. I am somehow reminded of an article I once read in one of those crappy airline magazines about how your name if your destiny. We can only imagine what happened on the schoolyard to a lad named 'Kim do Twat'.

But a tip, for real, consistent smug crapulosity it's hard to beat Keith Burgess-Jackson, who used to bill himself as the Anal Philosopher, which might provide the fodder for Lecture 2: Reverse Autism: Irony-Impairment and the Self-Blind. Lecture 3 in the series: What is a Hindrocket?