06 09 05
 Much is being made of this piece, which purports to identify new trends in manliness.

"The masculine ideal is being completely modified. All the traditional male values of authority,

infallibility, virility and strength are being completely overturned," said Pierre Francois Le Louet, the agency's managing director.”

By whom? Is this a joint project between men and women, or have men unilaterally decided to project an aura of servility, errancy, femininity and weakness? (It’s certainly easier to live that way. Easier to curl up than stand up, to coin an annoyingly facile phrase.) These aren’t exactly qualities that women appreciate, despite all the nonsense we were told in the 60s and 70s. There are some women, no doubt, who want sunken-chested twits who embody the Dan Hill school of masculinity – you know, sometimes-when-we-touch-the-honesty’s-too-much-and-I-have-to-close-my-eyes-and-hide approach. Most don’t.

Instead today's males are turning more towards "creativity, sensitivity and multiplicity," as seen already in recent seasons on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.

Arnold Schwarznegger and Sylvester Stallone are being replaced by the 21st-century man who "no longer wants to be the family super-hero", but instead has the guts to be himself, to test his own limits.

Children? You mean, raise them and support them? Icky icky! This will absolutely ruin my multiplicity. What do I look like, Rambo?

Apparently not:

"We are watching the birth of a hybrid man. ... Why not put on a pink-flowered shirt and try out a partner-swapping club?" asked Le Louet.

Perhaps because you’ll look like a florist ad and contract the clap? There’s your modern lap: FTDs and STDs. I hate to break it to these theorists, but it does not take guts for a young man to want to have multiple sex partners. It takes guts to settle down and have a family and rein in the roaming libido.

Sociologists and other experts spent three months analyzing some 150 magazines and books and 146 Internet sites, as well as interviewing a dozen experts from Europe, the United States and China.
The population of China, the US and the EU is – what, almost two billion? Twelve experts. That’s a ratio of one expert per 150 million people.

The traditional man still exists in China, Le Louet said, and "is not ready to go". But in Europe and the United States, a new species is emerging, apparently unafraid of anything.

Except the Chinese man, who will kick his ass if they look at him the wrong way.

"He is looking for a more radical affirmation of who he is, and wants to test out all the barbarity of modern life" including in the sexual domain, said Le Louet, adding that Reebok with its "I am what I am" campaign had perfectly tapped into this current trend.

All the barbarity of modern life. Got it? Modern life is barbaric. The plucked and shaved and moussed and hair-dyed fellow flouncing down the walkway with the Patented Serious Model Scowl is ready for some barbarism. Like what? Black belt with brown shoes? I am what I am. It worked for Popeye, as an unapologetic expression of being a short squinty sailor who stood foresquare against Blutoism. Here it’s an excuse for being a selfish fop who, without family or any other civilizing instincts, never considers that he might end up in some Clockwork Orange world having his teeth kicked out by some hooligans dressed in the height of modern fashion, sampling that delicious barbarism.

But the search for new markets is also driving research to profile the new European consumer -- the theme of the debate held by Fashion Group, which unites some 6,000 fashion industry professionals.

The answer is not simple, as culture and changing demographics make it hard to pin down the typical European, especially with the growing population of elderly.

But even though society is changing, Jean-Pierre Fourcat, a director with consultants Sociovision specialising in discerning social trends, believes there are some common threads.

"There is an increasing desire for people to be in charge of their own lives, and an intolerance for any lack of autonomy," he told the debate.

All of which must take place within the construct of socialism, of course.

"We are also moving into a different situation. We no longer need what we are used to, rather we need what is new.”

Never heard that before. Aside from the Carnaby Street fashion revolution, the hippie look, the back-to-nature look, the disco-era styles, the broad-shoulder Izod look, grunge, and other attempts to shove down the public gullet a style that comes complete with a philosophical outlook, we’ve never heard that people want something new and different for their different new situation. Finally:

"We have to help people to create their own look. And we absolutely must help people to dream, and if we help people to dream perhaps the world will be a little bit better," he said.

The world will not be better because men wear their suspenders backwards The day I ask French fashion consultants to help me dream is the day I start drinking so much coffee I never fall asleep. To paraphrase Bart Simpson: Can’t sleep. Clowns will dress me.

The good news: this is mostly nonsense. At least here in the US. Perhaps it’ll work in Europe, which has a large class of silly people inclinded to be is post- everything - post-national, post-religious, post-modern, post-gender. (It won’t work with the Muslim segment of their population, though.) It might work in America for a wee thin slice of the male population that lives in coastal cities, has the requisite vanity to carry it off, and is looking for a new role to replace the boring old Red State values he fled, seeking an enlightened place where people never say "Ozzie and Harriet" without rolling their eyes.

As for the rest of the country: the boxing movie “Cinderella Man” debuted at number four; the football themed “Longest Yard” was number two last week, and Star Wars – whose characters are all pretty full of authority, infallibility, virility and strength, has made a bezillion dollars. It should also be noted that metrosexuals did not sweep the last electoral contest.

But don’t tell that to the 12 experts. They’re busy exfoliating, and if you lose your place you have to start allllll over again.
06 08 05 HowDe Ho

The gift that keeps on giving, this Dr. Dean.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, unapologetic in the face of recent criticism that he has been too tough on his political opposition, said in San Francisco this week that Republicans are "a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party."

This will be met with two reactions: dismay from those who do not believe he speaks for Democrats – which is why he’s the head of the party, I guess – and elation from those who say Hell Yeah! Nail those pale christers, already! The former group has my sympathy, because it surely hurts to see the head of the party jam his foot so far in his mouth that the tassels of his loafers dangle from this buttocks. It must rankle the moderates to hear him fling this nonsense on a daily basis, after all; it's like having Pat Buchnan run the GOP and make constant fulminating speeches against Commie-Lezbo Vegans. The latter group might consider that Dr. Dean's reliable skill for vomiting undigested red meat on cue doesn’t endear them to moderates, but moderation isn’t what they want anyway. Unless you count “crucifying Bush but letting him climb down after half a day” as moderation.

“White Christian Party” has the advantage of Kluxer overtones, which plays into another hard-left paranoia: all them Jaysus people are a step away from whipping up a batch o' pointy hats with pillow cases and a can of spray starch, and marching into a field to hold hands around a cross and listen to someone demand that the entire book of Leviticus be made an amendment to the Constitution. The only one, for that matter. The ongoing freak-out of Deaniacs over religion is becoming a source of great amusement, really; it’s as if they just discovered that those big old buildings with purty glasss windows and pointy spires on top are actually used by people for something other than voting and annual pancake breakfasts. They can’t distance themselves from the groups that spend all their time using electronic microscopes to find crosses embedded in the currency or trying to keep the Boy Scouts from holding knot-tying classes in schools after class; they can’t reach out to the devout without having to explain why “white Christian” sounds like it’s meant as a criticism. Not an enviable position.

“They all behave the same.”

Oh, Howard. If you only knew.


06 07 05
Prager is interviewing two authors who spent some time interviewing the families of suicide bombers. The book, “The Road to Martyr’s Square,” probably won’t change the minds of those so steeped in 60s memes – all revolutionary struggles are righteous, the less powerful are automatically morally superior, and
a certain amount or righteous death is wicked cool. But even those people might be caught up short by some of the details. One remark that made me pause – literally; I was folding shirts, and just stopped to chew over what I’d heard. Palestinian TV has public service messages with houris beckoning you to martyrdom and paradise. Blow yourself up, c’mon upstairs and party. Public service messages. We’ll return to Barney, but first, this word from heavenly death Goulz!

Engaging Facile Moral Equivalence Filter . . . .working . . . working . . well hey, that’s just the same as Army recruiting ads that say join up and get all macho killing brown people, man.

Life was so much clearer when I was in college.

Note: it took some tweaking on the filter to make it automatically append “brown” to people. Glad I did; it adds that extra flourish of self-satisfied contempt that marks the true intellectual.

The authors also note that the martyr videos one can rent end with coming attractions. This guy hasn’t blown himself up yet, but he will! Coming to a bus stop near someone else, Summer 04.

If there is a hell, Arafat is being blown up and disassembled – with hot staples – every 27 seconds.
06 06 05
Teachout
on the quality of modern political art:

An example of the other kind is Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," which I saw around the same time as "Nine Parts of Desire." Mr. Shepard, who is one of America's most celebrated playwrights, described "The God of Hell" as a "satire" of "Republican fascism." Except for the fact that satires are supposed to be funny, I'd say that was a fair enough description of the play, in which a smirking, prancing fellow made up to look like Paul Wolfowitz invades the home of a Wisconsin farmer and his wife, festoons their kitchen with American flags, hooks up the genitalia of the man of the house to an electronic torture machine, and administers painful shocks until he agrees to surrender his heifers to the government for use in an unspecified but self-evidently nefarious secret project.

This stuff isn’t intended to persuade, as he notes; it’s meant to apply soothing warm Preconception Firming Gel to the buttocks of the audience, so they can clench them with righteous fury 24-7. “Republican fascism.” But of course. Shepard and his wife used to live in Minnesota. I wondered why I never saw him at the Torchlight Parades or Putsch Night down at Keegan's. That’s the odd thing about Kristallnacht – you’re so caught up on the burning and the kicking and the smashing that you don’t notice who isn’t there. At the time, anyway.

-------

The latest example of the US Army’s Koran Humiliation Initiative has that headline-grabbing word: URINE. You’d think Private Anderson swaggered over, unholstered Private Johnson and let loose a pounding stream of tangy intentional desecration on the book as it was clutched to the sobbing breast of the terrorist. (Sorry, detainee.) Of course, what really happened was slightly less horrible; someone took a leak outside the cells, and the gentle Caribbean breeze carried a jot of pee through a ventilation grill, where it lit upon the Koran.

As the WaPo story notes: “The Sergeant of the guard . . . ensure the detainee received a fresh uniform and a new Qu’ran.”

Life in the Gulag of our times. Bastards probably didn’t take all the pins out of the uniform. As for the allegation of flushing, the Pentagon inquiry “determined that no such incident took place. The probe did find, however –“

And here we get to the pith of the gist: Newsweek’s allegations were fake but accurate. “The probe did find, however that rumors of such an event swirled around the facility in the summer of 2002 after a detainee dropped his Qu’ran on the floor and other detainees blamed that on U.S. guards.”

Well, then. They made him drop it! Special Jew Mind Beams at work, no doubt. Say no more. No, let’s: “The story changed as detainees passed it along, escalating to rumors that U.S. troops ripped pages out of the book and then flushed it.”

So rumors escalated into more rumors. Remake page one. We continue: “But the investigation’s results also are contrary to the recent claims of top Pentagon officials that there were no credible accounts of Qur’an mishandling. The first case, in February 2002, arose when a detainee complained that guards at Camp X-ray kicked the Qur’an of a detainee in a neighboring cell. Though interrogators and guards noted the incident at the time, there was no further investigation.”

Three and a half years ago, a guard kicked a Qur’an. It’s a front page story today. Well, who am I to question the news judgment of the Post? Obviously it matters. One then must ask: is flushing worse than kicking? Flushing, after all, requires some amount of premeditation. One has to decide to flush a book. Kicking a book may be done in the heat of anger – say, when you’re interviewing someone fighting for a movement that wanted little girls to stay indoors all their lives dressed in hot sacks until the merry day when they were married off at 14 to some middle-aged guy with a nice job in the Remnants of Buddhism Demolition Division. If the guy might have info on what Al Qaeda was up to next – you know, the group from which the terro (SORRY!) detainee was plucked a mere five months after the Twin Towers thundered down, you might be tempted to shed all your civilized inhibitions and kick a book.

We continue: “Other confirmed reports included a two-word obscenity being written in the inside cover of the Qur’an, though investigators were unable to determine who wrote the phrase and concluded it was possible that the complaining detainee – who was conversant in English – may have defaced his own book.”

To squeeze it down: the investigation contradicted Pentagon reports that there were no credible accounts of Qur’an mishandling because there was a confirmed report of a naughty word written in the book, possibly by the book’s owner.

Got it? Front page summation in my paper: “Guards at Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba kicked, stepped on and splashed urine on the Qur’an, in some cases intentionally but also by accident, the Pentagon reporter. Detainees were also found to have abused it.”

Kicked, stepped on, and splashed urine. Splashed. The word suggests that someone waddled over with a brimming pot of urine and gave the vat a heave-ho, just to motivate the detainee. Stories like these must be told, of course, if only to show what the media finds important, and remind us how good things are going. I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:

What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?

"Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."

Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –

"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."

Oh. So we lost, then.

Don't get me wrong. I want us to do the right thing. I don't think there should be a policy that permits interrogators to treat the Qur'an like it was, oh, a Bible discovered in the Saudi airport customs line. But when it comes to the revelations of these Gitmo tales, I cannot care as much as they would like me to care. I cannot. Not to say we should treat the Qur’an with casual disrespect. But if an infidel touches the book with the wrong hand and people react like a two-year-old whose peas are touching the mashed potatoes, well, I understand why this matters, but when measured against the sins of headchoppery and carbombs, it pales to an evanescent translucence. Odd how the story isn’t about the rules and the precautions and the spine-cracking efforts to bend over backwards to make sure infidels get out the tongs when approaching the sacred book of the terrori – sorry, the detainees - Sorry, the murderous gynophobic gay-hating fundamentalist theocratic cultural imperialists. No, the story is the infinitesimal number of times in which the rules were breached over the course of years. It’s like doing a story about Wal-Mart’s employment practices, and following a story about forced overtime with an expose on expired non-dairy creamers in the breakroom. By hammering the tale for three weeks the MSM manages to dilute the impact of the beloved Abu Grabass scandal; pyramidal prisoners, wafting pee – all the same, all front page news. Of course, it’s all a seamless whole if your intention is to remind people of the three basic preconceptions of reporting on a war conducted by anyone whose initials aren’t JFK: the Pentagon lies, the troops are dullards and brutes, and Nixon is a criminal.

If Al Qaeda blew up a Bible depository in Malaysia tomorrow, it would be page A-16. If forty-six were killed in riots in Pakistan because of a rumor that US forces had pantomimed “The Satanic Verses” in a North Carolina PX, it would be on page A-12. When they’re nuts, it’s not news. When we’re found guilty of wind-assisted desecration, it’s A-1. You may draw your own conclusions from that. In any case, it’s had the expected result: (h/t LGF)

The Official Spokesman of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ambassador Atta El-Manan Bakhit, has stated that the confession by the southern command of the United States army on the occurrence of cases of desecration of the Holy Qur’an in Guantanamo prison was a confirmation of the practices that had been reported in the papers and strongly condemned by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

He said that this disgraceful conduct of those soldiers reveal their blatant hatred and disdain for the religion of millions of Muslims all over the world and throws into doubt the nature of the instructions given to the American soldiers on religious values and principles of tolerance.

He added that these unequivocally rejected practices could only lead to an incitement of religious feelings and a deepening of the gulf of difference and intolerance between the Muslim world and the United States of America.

The OIC Spokesman urged the United States Government to live up to its responsibilities and not be lenient with the perpetrators of the desecration. He also demanded that those responsible for this despicable crime should be brought to justice immediately and that urgent measures should be taken to calm the tension in the Muslim world and ensure that such detestable acts are not repeated in the future.

Hey, Newsweek: call up Tommy Franks and ask for the banner they put on the ship Bush visited. You know the one. Mission Accomplished.