A flirty rebuttal

Calling all Girls, calling all Girls! Man run amok behind
computer! Two-armed and dangerous! Will stop at nothing to portray
female advances in a horrific light. Subject is possibly rabid and
foaming at the mouth, marooned in a dilapidated, outmoded, and obsolete
vehicle at the dangerous high-speed intersection of Jeremiad and Revile,
or was that hard by Follywood and Whine? Should you choose to accept
this assignment, you may discover subject is merely mad at his mother;
perhaps at not being breastfed, and is having a fomenting and
fulminating flashback. It is entirely possible he will try to convert
you to his point of view by the journalistic equivalent of projectile
vomiting. All we can say is, Girls, please stick together and bring your
blow-guns!

If I had first encountered Geoff Metcalf’s recent column,
“Flirting with Disaster,
embedded as scratchings on a Pleistocene fossil, it would have felt
about right for that era. All I can say is, “Wow, what a tour de force
of cave-man journalism.” He writes, “The feminization of the military,
police, and fire departments is a cancer, which threatens to destroy a
cornerstone of American strength.” Awesome, bro, heavy duty. Swell out
your chest and have a cigar! You dun good!

Call me a cab, I mean, Call me a Femi-Nazi. Didn’t I hear them remind
us that — usually — only men rape, make wars, become serial killers?

Let’s look at that sentence again, with just a teensy word change:
“The masculinization of the military, police, and fire departments is a
cancer, which threatens to destroy a cornerstone of American strength.”

Think Waco. Think Ruby Ridge. Think MOVE in Philadelphia. Think
Littleton, Colo. Think Vietnam. Think any number of numbed-out,
dumbed-down skirmishes, global or local, triggered and escalated by the
itchy, twitchy Testosterone Brothers.

I feel faint.

Where are Susan Faludi and all those frilly neo-feminist thinkers
when we need them? Oh, on the cover of Newsweek, making men jealous.
Having won the right to hang out in jeans for a publicity photo.

Today’s men are hurting, opines Ms. Faludi, from perceived advances
by women.

Brilliant insight.

I guess that explains why my last lover’s favorite expression was,
“B—-, where’s dinner.”

Have you noticed how many Hurricanes and tropical storms are now
named after men these days? I’d say … that’s significant progress. For
guys. That these climatological outbursts are not just compared to
women having their periods or PMS or menopause, which I have heard
described, by the way, as “a pause from men,” but are, in the planetary
scheme of things, Yin to their Yang, or vice versa.

So Geoff Metcalf quotes military brass, and every last threatened,
insecure man within three inches of a telephone or a modem.

And then, he takes out the heavy artillery …

Drew Carey.

He actually quotes that great American philosopher Drew Carey. But
Drew Carey decontextualized, as a millennial avatar combining the worst
of Archie Bunker and Dilbert, not the post-Seinfeld TV character who …
breaks frame in his TV series and dates — instead of a past-pubescent
bimbette — a senior citizen.

He quotes a Drew Carey comedy routine … as Scripture and
justification! Duh. Listen: “I’m tired of being pushed around. Tired of
being grouped in with all the dead-beat dads and rapists and lecherous
bosses just because I’m a man. All men aren’t potential rapists. I’m not
a potential rapist. But, I am a potential murderer if all of you don’t
shut the f— up and get out of my face already.”

Lovely. Very freaking lovely, boys.

How can anyone be terrorized by second-class citizens?

I get the feeling Geoff is a very evolved being: “The purpose, the
mission, the goal and objective of the military is to close with and
destroy the enemy. We want and need our military to kill people and blow
up stuff,” he writes. “You don’t have to like that, but until YOU want
to pick up a rifle and stand a post, you want and need the military to
do that. That means you need arrogant, hard charging, more balls than
brains, fighting machines. Machines more focused on kicking butt and
taking names than any politically correct, outcome-based, sensitivity
trained rat excrement.”

Now that’s carcinogenic. Particularly the part where he
excoriates some women in the military for not believing in war and
killing. A sentence like that one of his just makes you want to burst
out in “The Star Spangled Banner,” doesn’t it?

Brag about the military needing to “kill people and blow up stuff”
all you want, but be careful where that road takes you. Particularly if
there’s a door-to-door search for pyschopaths in the neighborhood.
Consider, please, what Jim McBeth of “The Scotsman” writes of serial
killers: “They were men — almost invariably it is a man — who killed,
not in anger, but calculatedly, to relieve the pressure from bizarre
fantasies locked in their minds from childhood fueling the urge to
destroy. Having killed, they returned to being husbands, fathers,
colleagues; respectable, virtuous and dissociated from their acts.”

Let me quote another stand-up comedian, er, comedienne — this time
from the distaff side — the not-yet-notorious P-ssy Power: “I think
divorce is wrong and abortion is murder, but I believe every woman
should have the right to choose … who she wants to kill, especially
her own husband.”

Now where does that get us?

Nowhere. Back to square one.

Play nice, boys. It’s later than you think.