My Eyes, My Eyes!

I apologize for afflicting your eyes with this, but maybe you already saw it:


It's one of those exemplars of our current moment that's indescribable in its absurdity, like the image a few years ago that showed Jesus encircling Mulligan in His arms and aura as he sat in the Oval Office. And you'll note that Mulligan himself tweeted this Rockified illustration, which is some order of magnitude worse than the fact that the image exists in the first place.

Jared Yates Sexton, Hoosier professor, writer, and attender of more Trump rallies than I care to think about, had this to say about it:

Donald Trump is the epitome of toxic masculinity. All this posturing, all this bullying, all the authoritarianism and embracing of dictators and war criminals, is an attempt to hide a really deep and really pathetic insecurity.

It’s just...so unbelievably sad.

One of the mistakes we make with authoritarians like Trump and Putin is that we often view them through the lens of masculinity, exactly what they desperately need. These are really sad, insecure men. The posturing is compensation, the politics of cruelty a mask.

With Putin, the masculine facade is what the Right applauds, but it’s manufactured by political technologists. With Trump, garbage like this Rocky picture is just a lame attempt at boosting his flagging ego. It’s pathetic and breeds fascism in the name of personal identity.

In fact, fascism is born out of this masculine insecurity. There’s a reason these men surround themselves with war and weapons and militarized society. They need it because they themselves are weak and petrified of being exposed as weak. It’s external validation and armor.

Only by recognizing the pathetic nature of it all, and ripping the masculine aura away, can we keep these fascistic movements at bay. They recruit insecure young men who buy into this garbage. That’s how it grows. This is just lame posturing and we have to call it what it is.

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Tweets by Jared Yates Sexton are strewn throughout my monthly Twitter roundups. Here are a couple of posts that are more specifically about his words (one and two).