RK ARCHIVE - Regain your Manhood +óGé¼GÇ£ Join the Democrats!

A skinny guy is buying a tub of tofu with a sheepish look on his face, as he watches bigger, tougher men buying steaks the size of walruses. The words +óGé¼+ôRegain Your Manhood+óGé¼-¥ flash on the screen and we then see the same guy regaining his confidence as he maneuvers a big Hummer down the road.

Now, we can guess the target audience for this commercial +óGé¼GÇ£ Republicans. But what does this say about how they define manhood? It says that manhood is NOT about learning how to treat a lady; NOT about being a responsible and loving father; NOT about being a hard-working breadwinner who gives all he can back to society.

No, the lesson of this ad is that manhood means reveling in everything that is big, bad, loud, nasty, wasteful and destructive +óGé¼GÇ£ flipping the bird to society and the whole, wide world.

This commercial could be laughed off as a blatant Freudian appeal to guys who feel inadequate +óGé¼GÇ£ except until you consider the fact that American politics is now being driven by the same Freudian appeals.

Why, after all, are we really in Iraq? In my opinion, it was never fundamentally about WMD, Saddam Hussein, geopolitics, oil or the fantasy that we can just snap our fingers and create a democratic Middle East. I think the real reason Bush started this unnecessary war was to stir the soul of his core constituency, by using the same psychological symbolism of +óGé¼+ômanhood+óGé¼-¥ employed in the Hummer ad. (Remember the rhetoric: +óGé¼+ôWanted: Dead or Alive+óGé¼-¥; +óGé¼+ôBring it on+óGé¼-¥, etc.) It+óGé¼Gäós all about feeling strong by using big, loud, destructive vehicles and weapons, showing the world how tough we are!

Except that, like the tofu-chomping rebel in the Hummer commercial, what we+óGé¼Gäóre really showing are the unbelievable depths of our insecurity. How pathetic that the leaders of America feel that we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, cause the deaths of at least 40,000 people and destabilize the world in order to prove our manhood, in order to +óGé¼GÇ£ I hate to say it +óGé¼GÇ£ feel good about ourselves.

One can only be a REAL man by getting beyond this ridiculous caricature of manhood and adding more dimensions, more depth to one+óGé¼Gäós character. Real, mature mean deal with problems, they don+óGé¼Gäót just blow things up to relieve their frustrations.

And right now, that means joining the fight against the Conan-the-Barbarian cartoon of manhood being promoted by Bush and Hummer. Real men create peace, not war.

Comments

RE: Great Post! (JPTERP - 7/15/2006 1:57:47 AM)

Interesting Freudian reading of the Iraq War. In Cheney/Rove/Bush's rhetoric they obsess over "weakness". Cheney even said something recently to the effect of "the terrorist attack us because they think we're weak."
Who knows maybe the poor guy was picked on in middle school and the rest of his life has been one extended demonstration of how tough he really is. This goes for Karl Rove as well. Hadn't thought of that before.

My read on this "weakness" issue is that it comes with being the top-dog at the show--or at least being perceived as the top-dog by the rest of the world. It has nothing to do with people hating our values. It has everything to do with people resenting our power and the use of this power--sometimes on legitimate grounds, sometimes not.

the smaller the man the bigger the car.... (mosquitopest - 7/15/2006 10:22:47 AM)

It's kind of like buying into the matrix and believing one is a consumer not a citizen....money only goes so far and FELIX will be learning that lesson in November.

After all, Real Men Vote For Webb....

Regain your manhood (pogo - 7/19/2006 1:01:23 PM)

I think you need to regain your sense of humor. These ads are funny and poke fun at the cartoon-like stereotype some have of hummer owners. And you know what they say about stereotypes......

I think they are insulting. (phriendlyjaime - 7/19/2006 1:08:46 PM)

The new one for women; woman goes to park, waits in line for slide with child. Other bitchy mom and child cut in front. First mom feels like a jerk bc she did nothing about rude mom's behavior, so instead of bitch-slapping mom number 2 for being rude, she goes and buys a hummer.

Lemme tell you that bitchslapping mom number 2 would have been a lot more satisfying, and free.

And it is the choice I would have made.

Creating and feeding on insecurities, a standard tactic (greenstephen - 7/25/2006 9:33:33 PM)

It's not limited to feeding off people's insecurities, a core of the Republicans and the Hummer ad is to help inflame those insecurities first. You can really see it with the companion ad to Restore Your Manhood (they forgot to register the URL for their motto :-), where the woman is pushed around and then gets in her Hummer. These ads would be incomplete if it was just someone running around in a monster truck - they have to be put down first. Once you feel down, turn to us.

I've felt for a while that the answer to Rove isn't to imitate him, it's to bring some psychologists (with experience dealing with non-liberals) into the DNC and start exploring how to restore the sense of self-worth of Republicans. If people weren't lost and feeling ashamed, they might still be conservative, perhaps voting for a general like IKE, perhaps an anti-deficit strong-military-but-isolationist type, but they would never vote for W.