Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

July 29, 2011

Marcus Bachmann — Is He Macho Enough? And Why Would Reasonable People Even Discuss This?

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 11:06 am

By “reasonable people,” I am, of course, excluding Doug Wilson. Nevertheless, the Arbiter Of All That’s Good And Masculine has an odd little piece on Blog and Mablog concerning alleged liberal “attacks” and “bullying” directed toward presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. It appears that Marcus demonstrates what Wilson calls an “effeminate” manner of speaking, and this concerns Moscow’s Magistrate of Macho.

Here’s what Wilson says on his blog about ol’ Marcus:

“What he projects out in the open is the vision of a soft and effeminate man being pulled down the road by his dynamo of a wife. She appears to be a tornado in heels, and he appears to be a nice guy toiling in her wake…

The first woman president, if there is ever to be such, will present us with some interesting practical problems… One of those problems will be the problem of the First Dude. Just as American women have always wanted to admire the First Lady, so American men will want to look up to the First Man. And it has to be said — and remember I am simply talking about electability here — that this latter problem will be a thousand times more difficult than the former one has been. Think of it simply, and I am talking about the image of masculinity projected.

Most American men would think they could equal or far surpass Marcus Bachmann, and most American men would also think that Todd Palin’s Iron Dog snowmobile was about three hundred miles ahead of theirs. If a woman is ever going to be elected president, this is a dynamic that has to be taken fully into account. In the Bachmann campaign, it really does not appear to have been.”

Oh, my. The Bachmann campaign didn’t rate Marcus on the Macho Meter before it took off, and now — gasp! — a woman who, God help us, could be elected president will saddle us with a simpering, lisping husband looked down upon not only by American men, but by the entire male-supremacist, patriarchal world. She didn’t “taken into account” the need of American guys to have a “First Dude” who’s sufficiently rough, tough, and studly enough to garner their admiration. You know, a guy like Todd Palin, who can out-macho anyone, or at least as much as any guy with a proclivity for silk boxers can. What the country needs is a thoroughly masculine spouse if it ever chooses a female president, and Michelle and Marcus — the strident siren and the simpering sap — didn’t do their homework. Thus saith Wilson, and so be it.

Shame on liberals who mock Marcus’ speech and mannerisms — those Hollywood pundits who swear their gaydar went off the charts when they saw and heard him. But shame on masculinist pastors who in analyze the content of a presidential candidate’s campaign with an odd and yet utterly predictable caution that somewhere, somehow, someone out there — in her very own family, yet! — hasn’t embraced Wilsonian Masculinity 101. Maybe Marcus Bachmann can’t grow a Wilsonian beard. Maybe his voice isn’t that of the Reformers past, deep and rumbling, full of both authority and of assurance — because we know (!) that Zwingli, Calvin, et al and including Jonathan Edwards, spoke like Wilson. And maybe Marcus Bachmann doesn’t use his manicured, uncalloused hands to rip through a guitar solo of “Sweet Home Alabama” — as Wilson does.

Or maybe the problem is that Marcus Bachmann married a vibrant, energetic, articulate woman — a woman who I think would be a disastrous president, by the way — and appears to be quite pleased with her. That, to Doug Wilson, just isn’t right. And so the punditry begins: Michelle blew it by not taking into account the slobbering masculinity of the American male. Her defeat has been foretold, and it is a defeat deserved. She is now a cautionary tale: Women, don’t get too far ahead of your guy in public, or else you’ll make him into a weenie and you’ll both fall into the roast.

Rarely have I read such a bone-hard dictum with so little actual meat. Wilson really ought to cease with the political punditry and slink back to the pulpit . . . although he is unfit for that as well. With any fortune, there’ll be an appropriately masculine lumberjack position offered him in the near future, where he can flex his macho chops and do damage only to the inanimate and insentient. Because when it comes to understanding and commenting on people, his peculiar obsession with masculinity causes real harm to real men and to the real women who share their lives.

If I ever run into Marcus Bachmann, I think I’ll give him a big hug — or a shoulder punch. For now, though, I pray that he be spared obnoxious commentary about speech and mannerisms that are entirely irrelevant to much of anything at all.

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