Month: August 2024

Watching Coach Walz and the Painfully Fragile Masculinity of MAGA

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

August 24, 2024

It seems like there is a widespread consensus that the highlight of this week’s Democratic National Convention was the reaction of Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s son to his nomination to the vice president slot under Kamala Harris. We’ve all see the clip of 17-year-old Gus Walz overcome with emotions, in tears, shouting, “That’s my dad!” I burst into tears watching it as did millions of fellow dads, moms, sons, and other normal human beings. Gus immediately became a meme, celebrating joy, pride, and a love of a child for their parent.

That was among normal people.

As is my habit, I flipped over to check on the dark side. Fox News commenters said the young Walz was faking it, overly feminine, and “retarded.” Some said this is the kind of “sissy boys” that liberal men raise and another made an image of Tim Walz breastfeeding his teenage son. Seriously damaged commentator Ann Coulter decried that the teenager’s display of emotion was “weird.” And it just got worse from there. “We need to raise men who can defend their country, not blubber like babies. This proves that communism destroys masculinity,” one poster wrote. Others pointed to the teenager as proof that “liberals have turned boys into girls and girls into boys.”

This is par for the course for the right. They’ve tried to emasculate Democratic men for supporting a female presidential candidate. (Numerous memes assert that liberal men are all gay.) That includes National Guard veteran and former high school football coach Tim Walz (who, I’m quite sure, is a better gun shot than any of them). MAGA men want “trad wives,” not “boss ladies.” And while they feminize Democratic men, they turn Trump into a hyper-masculine Rambo, giving the elderly obese junk food fan a six-pack and bulging muscles, dodging bullets and taking down communists. It’s perfectly homo-erotic.

This is the tried and true tactic of the schoolyard bully. I co-authored a book with Wayne Wooden in 2001, in the wake of the rash of school shootings that peaked with Columbine in 1999. It was called Renegades Kids, Suburban Outlaws and in it I examined a wide range of school shooting cases, often digging into court transcripts. The common denominator was that the shooters were typically bullied with feminizing language, like “fag” and “pussy.” The bullies tried to take these young men’s masculinity away. The bullies also helped define masculinity as the opposite of femininity, after all, “opposite sexes.” Anything coded as feminine, including showing emotion and not supporting violence, was “unmasculine” and “weak,” threatening the masculine/feminine boundary, deserving of punishment.

I dealt with this in 10th grade when I quit the football team and became a punk rocker. The attacks were relentless. I can still hear Ted, the bully of Martin Road. “Hey Gayzak, you like that fag music!” One afternoon he stopped me after school and said, “Hey Gayzak, you’re a pussy!” And I replied, “Well Ted, I guess you are what you eat, you dick.” He punched me in the face.

For the school shooters in my book, when bullied, they attempted to reclaim their masculinity in the only way they knew how, with murderous gun violence. They took the old macho adage “die on your feet or live on your knees” literally. They went out like “men.”

Fortunately there’s a new version of masculinity in town and it’s not the John Wayne, strong, silent, and violent model that gets men and boys killed. It’s not defined by dominating women, girls, and all things feminine. It’s strong, free with emotions, and embraces women and girls as equals, not bodies to be dominated. We’ve traded in John Wayne for Tim Walz and, boy, are the fragile “alpha” men of MAGA triggered. If Trump men don’t have domain over women and their bodies, what do they have?

We’ve been here before. Right-wing men called Barack Obama a “pussy” and his wife a “man.” But it’s not 2008 anymore. The majority of the workforce is now female and women are not going back. The looming reality of a female president has fragile MAGA men apoplectic. If the president is female, what is left of their “God-given” authority?

But there is a way out of this quicksand of toxic masculinity. Those men can talk to the women in their lives and, by “talk,” I mean listen. Ask those women what they really want to see in the world and I guessing what they will hear is that the women and girls they love want men to enable them, not disable them. Or they can just ask, what would Coach Walz do? #WWCWD

The Mulatto Panic: MAGA’s Racial Confusion

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

August 7, 2024

The first epic film was D.W. Griffith’s 1915 opus, The Birth of the Nation. The 193 minute-long silent black & white classic is based on the novel, The Clansman, which glorified the birth of the Ku Klux Klan after the defeat of the South in the Civil War. A central character is Silas Lynch, a mulatto who Reconstructionists elect lieutenant governor of South Carolina. Lynch, who lusts for a white congressman’s daughter, attempts to reign in the KKK, who ride to a violent victory in the end of the movie.

The word “mulatto” has fallen out of favor but has become relevant again with Donald Trump’s inability to define Kamala Harris’s racial identity,

The term mulatto was originated by Spanish and Portuguese slave traders to identify the children of African slaves who had been raped by Europeans and served to blur the color line between white and black. American slave states popularized terms like “quadroon” and “octoroon” to identify slaves that had a white grandparent or great grandparent. In 1910, Tennessee adopted the “One Drop” rule that dictated that if an individual was 1/32 black, they were legally a “negro.” The original 1859 Oregon constitution contained references to mulattos, including an 1849 exclusion clause that stated, “Be it enacted by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Oregon that it shall not be lawful for any negro or mulatto to enter into, or reside within the limits of this Territory.”

So what’s the problem with mulattos?

Yesterday’s mulatto is today’s bi-racial person, which includes a massive percentage of the human race, including my daughter. But in the slave days this designation was essential as all non-European people were defined as less-than human after Pope Nicholas V signed the Dum Divervas in 1452. The decree paved the way for four centuries of chattel slavery. The dehumanization of non-whites also meant the offspring of white and non-white unions were not fully human, even if they looked white. And by looking white, these half-human beasts could sneak into white civilization. So the need to maintain the white/not white color line became the prime directive of white supremacy.  They believed then, as they do now, that miscegenation (“race mixing!”) would destroy the white race and, therefore, their God-given domain over non-white subhumans.

This is why Silas Lynch is the villain of The Birth of a Nation. His whiteness gets him access to the halls of power and his blackness brands him a “savage” with his sights set on planting his seed in white women and oppressing white men. Once the color-line is destroyed, white supremacists no longer can tell who is on their side and who is the enemy. Much of this narrative was revised when bi-racial Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008. Racists argued his whiteness would get him elected and then he would unleash blackness on white America. “He’s firing white people from their jobs,” a racist skinhead told me shortly after the election. “He hasn’t even been sworn in yet and we’re in a massive recession. Everybody is getting fired!” I told him.

Next to the fear of non-whites “passing” as white is the need to maintain a simple us vs. them color line. Race is a human invention so it’s always been challenging to maintain racial boundaries. One hundred years ago, the Irish were not considered “white,” and Irish immigrants were the target of the 1920s KKK. Most people who call themselves “white” are multiracial mutts. I’m Slavic on my father’s side and Anglo-Saxon on my mothers side (and, according to 23 and Me, 0.2 Middle Eastern!). We’re all “mulatto.” Among those who identify as African-American, 18 percent have identifiable white ancestors and a whole bunch of white supremacists of have black branches in their family tree. But the myth of racial purity continues to fuel racist ideologies over who is more “human.”

But there’s a certain brain type that can’t handle the complexity of our racial identities. They need people people to fit into one box or the other. They ask people of color, “What are you?” The many shades of gray explode their brains. “Are you Asian or Mexican?” “Um, I’m Filipino.” Their world is divided into good vs. evil, right vs. left, and white vs. black. “Context” is a liberal concept and non-duality is some foreign Buddhist mumbo jumbo. “You’re either my version of Christian or you are an agent of Satan.”

This is where Donald Trump’s buffoonery comes in. While speaking to a convention of black journalists last week, in one of his more unhinged word salads, Trump mused on when Kamala Harris “turned black.” “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” he said. Trump’s binary brain can’t understand that she is both, Indian and Black. “You can’t be both! That’s not allowed!” Tell that to anyone who defines themselves as Scotch-Irish. Unlike millions of Americans, Trump’s never had to choose which box to check on a form when more than one apply. And he’s never had anyone stare at his face and ask, “What are you?” 

Trump’s limited cognitive ability is reflected in his knuckle-dragging MAGA base, who immediately went to work attacking Harris’ racial identity. One Trumpie on my social media feed posted, “She’s not African-American, her father is Jamaican!” I had to give him a brief lesson on the African diaspora. He agreed that Bob Marley was black, so I took it as a win. The MAGA narrative that Harris is a “ho” and a “DEI hire,” is in line with their core values of racism and misogyny and their need fit human beings into handy categories. The 33.8 million Americans who identified as multiracial in the 2020 census have heard the “What are you?” question too many times and are just about done with trying to fit in a box for the comfort of white people. Their box routine allows them to define you. Shattering the box allows you to define yourself and that’s exactly what Kamala Harris is doing.

Kamala Harris is a successful woman, who is the daughter of immigrants. She has a complex racial identity and has a husband who actually loves her. And she loves America. You can see why that confuses Donald Trump and his base.