Impotent, limp and gutless

“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.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.