Go ahead and put your plastic covering over your keyboards so that you don’t spew your various cocktails all over them.
Done?
Okay. Let’s visit Gene Lalor, writing at the American Conservative:
Ok, you’re a normal, healthy male with normal, healthy appetites and volunteer to become one of the few and the proud. You sign up for the United States Marine Corps–not “corpse,” Mr. President. You’re assigned to Camp Lejeune to endure the rigors of boot camp and find yourself bunking next to a Megan Fox lookalike recruit.
Healthy or not, that wouldn’t be a healthy environment for any jarhead, least of all an impressionable 19 year old expecting to survive boot camp.
Has Vivid done that one yet? Surely, they’ve done that one.
That’ a variation on the scenario Marine Corps’ commandant General James Conway wants to avoid if and when Bill Clinton’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, (DADT), policy regarding gays in the military is repealed. The difference would be that the normal healthy male would effectively become the Megan to the homosexual(s) in the next bunk(s).
Wait, you didn’t say you were hot. I didn’t imagine you hot. Are you really that hot? I highly doubt it. What is it about sniveling little crybaby straight men that they think that all gay men want to have sex with them?
And is this wuss really saying that men won’t be capable of becoming strong Marines if there are gay men around? Because that doesn’t even make sense…
AND if the Megan Fox analogy made ANY kind of sense, you’d have to factor in the fact that if Megan Fox was bunking next to a straight dude, his chances of doing the naughty naughty with her would STILL be zero, just like they would be for a gay Marine who happened to bunk next to the hot male Marine equivalent of Megan Fox. So, really, what is the problem?
Anyway, he blathers on for another second, and then there’s this:
The president and the Gay Lobby now have senior military officers arguing over gays in the military, making huge expenditures for private quarters, and advising dissenters to just get out–and no one has even mentioned the questions of what to do about heads and shower rooms or where the gays would hang their purses.
Oh, what would this sad little wingnut do if he ended up on the wrong side of an altercation with a gay Marine, trained to kill just like any other?
But do note the way that the insane homophobia and far-too-easily threatened masculinity exhibited by Gene Lalor creates two seemingly conflicting emotions: Extreme terror at the concept of the all powerful gays who will turn them into hot Megan Fox ladies AND a sense that gay men could never be as strong, as masculine, as valiant as they are. I say “seemingly conflicting emotions” because they’re actually not. The second emotion is a reaction against the first one. The terror is real, and on some level, wingnuts like Gene Lalor actually DO understand that there are thousands of gay men already in the armed forces who already ARE bigger, better, stronger, and smarter men than the Gene Lalors of the world. They understand this, and they rebel against it by portraying gay men as purse-carrying sissies.
For the weak-minded wingnut men of the world, gay men are threatening because we turn their notion of being THE superior race (over women, over blacks, etc.) on its head. Our existence in the armed forces, or in positions of power over them, is frightening for them. The emotion they feel is “If a gay man can defend this country better than I can, then who am I better than?”
I harp on this a lot, but we always have to remember that weak-minded wingnuts are never just homophobes or just racists, etc. They feel threatened from all angles, and it always comes down to “Who am I better than?”
There’s a piece you all need to read. It’s actually about the teabagger mindset, but it applies across all levels of wingnuttia, because their various psychoses are inextricably linked:
“You know when I was a little boy, there was an old negro farmer that lived down the road from us, named Monroe. He was … (subtle laugh), I guess he was just a little more luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule.
It was a big deal in round that town. Now my daddy hated that mule. Cause, his friends were always kidding him about, “They saw Monroe out plowing with his new mule and Monroe is going to rent another field now he had a mule.”
One morning that mule showed up dead. They poisoned the water. After that, there wasn’t any mention about that mule around my daddy. It just never came up. One time we were driving down that road and we passed Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He just packed up and left, I guess, he must of went up north or something.
I looked over at my daddy’s face, I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and said, “If you ain’t better than a nigger son, who are you better than?”” – Agent Anderson, Mississippi Burning
And welcome to the Tea-hadist mindset. With Barack Obama in charge…who are you going to be better than?
And don’t think some of us recognize the symptom because we are a pack of condescending know-it-all asshats. We are…but that has fuck-all to do with the observation.
It’s just that we have seen this before. Up North…in our so-called “enlightened” neck of the woods.
Want to know the difference between North and South? Well, a man once told me that up North, it is OK to have a Black as your boss, but you will be damned if you will have one for a neighbor. Down South, it is OK to have a Black neighbor…but you will damned if you will have one as a boss.
So we went through all this Tea Party nonsense up North, about 35-45 years ago. And the reaction was just as vehement, inarticulate, and dumb as what is being spewed now. If you want to see hate and spittle, you should have seen how South Boston reacted to school integration.
But you would not have seen it 24/7 as you do today. It happened…but not in a perpetual echo chamber. And thank Christ for that.
And if you think the enlightened liberal North embraced integrated housing with open hearts, think again, It was called “white flight” and it damn near emptied some cities. “Sure, we support integration…now excuse us while we move to the suburbs where those Zulus won’t be able to spear us with their assegais.”
But white flight was a safety valve. It kept the pressure at reasonable levels. It also prolonged it and led to new levels of stupidity, but you could, after all, vote with your feet. Many did. Many still do.
Please read every word of that, and then consider the fact that there is so much cross pollination between the different strains of wingnuttia, and yet almost NO cross-pollination with the rest of the population. Yes, there are a few outliers here and there (gay conservatives come to mind, but the self-hatred is self-evident, so it’s not that much of an outlier), but it’s rare indeed to find a confident liberal who supports sensible economic and foreign policy, supports the rights of gays and lesbians to marry, but is also an anti-choice extremist. Or likewise, it’s not often you find a liberal who’s an atheist and supports LGBT equality and regulating Wall Street, but has a particular hard-on for bombing brown people. Why? Because the sorts of irrational fear and hatred that lead a person to be a neocon, or an anti-choice extremist, or an anti-gay bigot, or an anti-government teabagger who thinks that Obama is coming for their grandmother, all overlap and work together. They are all symptoms of a larger psychological problem, and that problem is the insane, desperate need to feel BETTER than somebody else.
Liberals don’t really do this, at least not in the same way. I’m not saying that liberals aren’t condescending. We totally are. But it’s not because a single one of us is scared that Sarah Palin will beat us in a contest of wits. We say she’s stupid because she clearly is. We don’t say that anti-science nitwits are morons because we’re scared that some day Creationism will be validated. It clearly won’t, but it hurts our chances in a rapidly changing world to teach our kids that Jesus rode a dinosaur.
But when wingnuts toss anti-gay slurs and imagine that their poor widdle boys will be turned gay by the repeal of DADT; when they make “jokes” about Obama using a teleprompter when he’s clearly the most talented orator to hold the office of President in generations; when they honk amongst themselves about how “Libtards so silly I ain’t evolved from no monkey!”, they’re reacting against their (valid) fears that their worldview is crumbling, being disproven, before their eyes. One common denominator of the various intertwined wangs of wingnuttia is that they’re mostly anchored by straight, white men who have enjoyed a pedestal in society that they never earned. I don’t care how little education you have, but if you’re straight, white and male in Fulton, Mississippi (for example), you’ve historically still been ahead of a poor black family from the same area, as social strata go, just by virtue of your pigmentation and your penis. But things are changing, and it’s becoming harder and harder to take that straight, white, male supremacy for granted. So they’re losing their minds, a little bit. When they laugh at Obama’s teleprompter, here’s what’s really going on:
The fake teleprompter bit is rooted in racial insecurities/straight up racism. As in: “How can we explain away the fact that a black man has ascended to the office of President when we all know black men are inferior (especially intellectually)?” Or at least, “How can we soothe our stung white man’ pride at the fact?”
One way is to knock the uppity negro down a peg and/or to point out that he really isn’t all that smart after all — that he only sounds articulate because he’ reading off a teleprompter (unlike all those white presidentz).
That explains it!
It’ the same rationale behind Limbaugh’ claims that Obama only got into Harvard Law, and a spot as Editor of Law Review, because his professors and students either changed his grades (out of white guilt) or did his work for him (same). Because no black man could do something like that on his own, what with being innately stupid compared to white folks like Sarah Palin.
And likewise, when straight, white men bitch and moan and make jokes about DADT repeal, or about LGBT rights in general, or about feminists, or choice, they’re expressing a very real fear that the jig is up, and that straight, white men actually shouldn’t control society by default. That there are black people, women, and yes, LGBT people who are, yes, better than them. Stronger than them. Smarter than them. Funnier than them. And so on.
And it makes them crazy.
(h/t Roy Edroso and The Poor Man Institute)
