Debt Ceiling Fashion Faux Pas!
Will no one think of the children?
Links are at the end, shoeless.
Three of the four top congressional leaders—McConnell, McCarthy, and Jeffries—were caught on film wearing dress sneakers during debt ceiling negotiations in the Oval Office. The New York Times wisely chose not to waste space on the subject in the print edition but the story got 650 words online, which is about 649 too many.1
If you’re standing atop a slippery slope, you want something with a bit of grip.
“we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers”
Washington Post book critic Becca Rothfeld uses Josh Hawley’s prescriptive book on manhood to address the endless male history of existential despair.2
For practically as long as men have existed, they have been in crisis. Everything, it seems, threatens them with obsolescence. As far back as the 1660s, King Charles II warned English men that a new beverage called coffee would destroy their virility, and in the early 1900s, opponents of coeducation worried that feather beds, dancing and even reading might emasculate little boys. Men were in peril at the turn of the 20th century, when the founder of the Boy Scouts cautioned that “we badly need some training for our lads if we are to keep up manliness in our race instead of lapsing into a nation of soft, sloppy, cigarette suckers,” and they had not recovered by 1958, when the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in Esquire that “something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.” A dispatch from the journalist Susan Faludi confirmed that manliness remained “under siege” in 1999. No wonder there is such a chorus of complaints about the dearth of male role models. After so many centuries of coffee, reading and cigarette-sucking, are there even men left to emulate?
We men are a fragile lot, and were it not for weaponry and rage we’d probably have long preceded the dodo in extinction. Death by starvation, hypnotized by the reflection of our manhood in the mirror.
Rothfeld doesn’t take Missouri’s junior senator seriously, but she spared him on the matter of his Yakety Sax-accompanied flight through the halls of Congress.3 We had thought the law demanded mention of it.
In related news, LiveScience has the scoop on our shrinking balls of fire.4
“To disentangle the subjective experience of ketamine from the biochemical effects of the drug, researchers at Stanford University recruited 40 participants who were preparing to undergo general surgery and who also had mild to moderate depression.”
Already I’m thinking the sample is skewed.5 In any event, in every event, ketamine works for me although without the surgery element. I’m a man, yes I am and I can’t help but love it so.
Manhood, amirite, ladies?
Most of the patients at the clinic where I get my ketamine are women. Women are diagnosed with depression at about double the rate of men. Is unwarranted self-confidence a factor? I don’t know; I’m not afflicted with that debility.
I looked up “debility” to see that I used it appropriately. The Oxford English Dictionary magic eight-ball says all signs point to yes: “that condition of the body in which the vital functions generally are feebly discharged.”
Feeble discharge is the leading cause of general surgery among depressed men. But Special K takes the blues away.
Anyway. Gotta see what’s going on in the mirror.
Music, damn!
The Paranoyds have shown up here before, but this album is new to me. I’d not heard either Diet Cig or Annabelle Chairlegs; of the two, the latter suits me best, but nobody here is charmless.
The Paranoyds, “Carnage Bargain;”6 Diet Cig, “Do You Wonder About Me?”7 Annabelle Chairlegs, “Gotta Be In Love.”8
That, Comrades, is all a man’s got
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Be well, take care.
"Were it not for weaponry and rage. . . " and women.