Saturday, August 25, 2012

Manliness is Next to Godliness

Last week, many people last week expressed outrage and incredulity about an NRO blog in praise of Romney's manliness, undoubtedly validating the infatile author's basic project, which, like most of his ilk's, is pissing off liberals.  Echidne's was one of the better respones however.  She quotes the key passages:

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that. 
It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

 
What few people seem to have noticed though is the way this sort of brilliantly betokens the paradigm case: as Chris Hedges says, Fascism is a cult of masculinity. Different dogmas get operationalized in support -- here the Master race is being eclipsed by the Master Gender – but there’s always a bit of pseudoscience in service of the agenda. See here, God is basically telling us that Mitt,"apex alpha executive," is born to rukle over us little people, and the proof is the manliness of his progeny  -- that and his wealth of course.  It just remains for Karl Rove and the Kocj brotjhers to raify his Divine Election here on Earth.  Basically this is another example of our refeudalization – the cherished wish of the authoritarians that some Men will rule by Divine Right passed down from God the Father. It used to be they thought his plan was written in our stars; now they’ve reversed the ‘scope and locate his imperative in our genes.

I don'n know why people aren't more conscious that what these guys (and the women who worship them) basically want is a braid (and mutual alibi society) of kindred hierarchical authorities -- military/police, church, corporate, and royal.  They really think that the world should be run by a few guys who move their armies, flocks, workforces, serfs around with the paranormal force of their wills and intellect, in accord with their fair but cruel Darwinian whims.  They also think that these guys, the [wealth] Creators should dwell in the example of Yaweh, for whom no glory is too ostentatious, no prostration unduly abject.  Fifty years ago Terry Southern articulated their fondest fantasy in Dr. Stangelove, where the eponymous Nazi pitches the idea of a mine-shaft colony where the Masters of the Universe will wait for the radiation to die down, each doing his part to repopulate the world, his "prodigious duty" made easier by the fact that his ten or so breeder females will be selected for their sexual attractiveness. 

 
Don’t let anyone tell you that there is a moral difference between these people and the Nazis. They can’t wait to start exterminating.


 

posted by Kalkaino @ 11:12 AM 0 comments