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Impotent, limp and gutless
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09/08/10 12:55 PM ET
“It’s okay to be a man.” — Kurt Cobain, Journals
Decades back, as I recall, Pete Hamill, New York’s great journalist, wrote a piece titled “The End of Machismo.” Machismo was a word that had come into fashion meaning exaggerated masculinity, but it came to be used to refer to any man who was just a man.
The thing is it didn’t end, because it can’t. Machismo/manhood went into exile in Tony Soprano’s New Jersey. And what masterful troupe acting came from that. But the only ones allowed then the free and noble play of honor, love, family, sin, commitment and responsibility were fictitious New Jersey gangsters.
Now it comes out of the Bada Bing! strip club and back into the light. Anyone with the psychologist’s bent — like that behavioral type at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce who looks like Dr. Joyce Brothers — might do a “psychological types” study on this new phase, because it brings a new paradigm and a vast change of temperament is at hand.
It is not really about manlies. It is about clarity, strength and action in collective responsibility. As the point is made in Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Samurai Trilogy,” the rules are the same for the monk as they are for the warrior.
I would say it comes — or comes back — from war cycles. Or Brett Favre’s animal spirits. Or both. Sgt. James turned the tide, and he brought the creative culture with him when “The Hurt Locker” won six Academy Awards. Neurasthenic Weasel Boy is not good at war. Sgt. James is very good, and he is war’s one basic necessity. Hollywood today is finished with Weasel Boy. “Impotent, limp and gutless,” Sarah Palin calls him. Weasel Boy does not sign his work. He hides behind anonymity. Nor will he hold fast, like Anwar Sadat, to take the bullet in the chest when his time comes.
This month change comes via Hollywood: Homestar Runner yields empowerment back to Strong Bad. “The Town” arrives with an elementary group of manly individuals: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner (Sgt. James), Jon Hamm (Don Draper), Pete Postlethwaite, who you would definitely want in your foxhole or on a drive through South Boston, and other toughs. And on TV comes Tom Selleck as top cop in “Blue Bloods”; Father Cop — a kind of mature Master Chief of police in NYC, bringing the pattern to full form. Selleck has the manlies of Strong Bad and can’t be topped for manlies. He was “Magnum, P.I.,” which ran from 1980 to 1988. And we are going there again starting now, I guarantee it.
This is not bad for Obama. He comes to it, but it is not good for the Clintons and their generation. It is completely good for women who can drive snow machines, have babies, trim a deer and cook it or run Hewlett-Packard, make their own money and lives with or without a man. And of course it is good for Joe Miller of Alaska.
Here in Boston the transition is astonishing. It is no longer Matt Damon’s lace-curtain liberal Boston; it is poker ace Ben Affleck’s. The difference can be seen between the unbearable lightness of Damon’s casino-robbing crew and Affleck’s gnarly group of rude boys. And Affleck’s movie is about Boston, the toughest city on earth, which has found its center again, thanks to the miraculous acts of Manny & Co. (“Everything is my fault,” says Ramirez, Christ-like, “but you have to be a real man to realize when you are wrong.”) It comes to us as well in Scott Brown’s pickup truck, and just in the nick of time.
Decades back, as I recall, Pete Hamill, New York’s great journalist, wrote a piece titled “The End of Machismo.” Machismo was a word that had come into fashion meaning exaggerated masculinity, but it came to be used to refer to any man who was just a man.
The thing is it didn’t end, because it can’t. Machismo/manhood went into exile in Tony Soprano’s New Jersey. And what masterful troupe acting came from that. But the only ones allowed then the free and noble play of honor, love, family, sin, commitment and responsibility were fictitious New Jersey gangsters.
Now it comes out of the Bada Bing! strip club and back into the light. Anyone with the psychologist’s bent — like that behavioral type at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce who looks like Dr. Joyce Brothers — might do a “psychological types” study on this new phase, because it brings a new paradigm and a vast change of temperament is at hand.
It is not really about manlies. It is about clarity, strength and action in collective responsibility. As the point is made in Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Samurai Trilogy,” the rules are the same for the monk as they are for the warrior.
I would say it comes — or comes back — from war cycles. Or Brett Favre’s animal spirits. Or both. Sgt. James turned the tide, and he brought the creative culture with him when “The Hurt Locker” won six Academy Awards. Neurasthenic Weasel Boy is not good at war. Sgt. James is very good, and he is war’s one basic necessity. Hollywood today is finished with Weasel Boy. “Impotent, limp and gutless,” Sarah Palin calls him. Weasel Boy does not sign his work. He hides behind anonymity. Nor will he hold fast, like Anwar Sadat, to take the bullet in the chest when his time comes.
This month change comes via Hollywood: Homestar Runner yields empowerment back to Strong Bad. “The Town” arrives with an elementary group of manly individuals: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner (Sgt. James), Jon Hamm (Don Draper), Pete Postlethwaite, who you would definitely want in your foxhole or on a drive through South Boston, and other toughs. And on TV comes Tom Selleck as top cop in “Blue Bloods”; Father Cop — a kind of mature Master Chief of police in NYC, bringing the pattern to full form. Selleck has the manlies of Strong Bad and can’t be topped for manlies. He was “Magnum, P.I.,” which ran from 1980 to 1988. And we are going there again starting now, I guarantee it.
This is not bad for Obama. He comes to it, but it is not good for the Clintons and their generation. It is completely good for women who can drive snow machines, have babies, trim a deer and cook it or run Hewlett-Packard, make their own money and lives with or without a man. And of course it is good for Joe Miller of Alaska.
Here in Boston the transition is astonishing. It is no longer Matt Damon’s lace-curtain liberal Boston; it is poker ace Ben Affleck’s. The difference can be seen between the unbearable lightness of Damon’s casino-robbing crew and Affleck’s gnarly group of rude boys. And Affleck’s movie is about Boston, the toughest city on earth, which has found its center again, thanks to the miraculous acts of Manny & Co. (“Everything is my fault,” says Ramirez, Christ-like, “but you have to be a real man to realize when you are wrong.”) It comes to us as well in Scott Brown’s pickup truck, and just in the nick of time.
Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.
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