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\u00a9 Library of Congress \/ From unsplash.com<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n An extremely right-wing author and essayist recently caused an uproar by saying something offensive on social media.\u00a0 That\u2019s hardly news these days.\u00a0 Anyway, impelled by morbid curiosity, I checked out said author and essayist\u2019s blog.\u00a0 No, I\u2019m not going to provide a link to it because the dribbling jackanapes has already received enough free publicity.\u00a0 One remark on that blog caught my eye and made me think, though.\u00a0 It was a description of President, soon-to-be ex-President, Donald Trump as\u00a0 \u2018the alpha-male of alpha-males\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let me get this straight.\u00a0 Donald Trump is not only an alpha-male, but is the most alpha-male going?\u00a0 You\u2019ve got to be kidding.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The last four years and, indeed, most of the past 74 years that Trump has been on the planet are peppered with instances that show him to be not so much an alpha-male as an alpha-wuss.\u00a0 Indeed, the past month-and-a-half since the US presidential election, when Joe Biden handed Trump his arse on a plate by massively winning both the popular vote and the electoral college, has shown him to be even more pathetic than normal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Seeing Trump react to defeat with a display of whiny, shrieky, stamping-his-little-feet, waving-his-little-fists, chucking-his-toys-out-of-the-pram petulance doesn\u2019t make me think of some muscled, lantern-jawed, bare-chested, testosterone-oozing specimen of maleness swaggering his way through a Hollywood action movie.\u00a0 Rather, it makes me think of the obnoxious Violet Elizabeth Bott<\/a>, the lisping little girl in Richmal Crompton\u2019s William<\/em> books (1922-70) who, when anyone refused to let her have her way, would threaten: \u201cI\u2019ll thcream and thcream and thcream till I\u2019m thick!\u201d\u00a0 Or of Veruca Salt, the monstrously spoilt little girl in Roald Dahl\u2019s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em> (1964), who proved so unbearable that Willie Wonka\u2019s squirrels ended up throwing<\/a> her down a garbage chute to the factory\u2019s incinerator.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ironically, the right-wing dingbats who support Trump often lament the decline of good old-fashioned masculine values, thanks to, as they see it, assaults in recent decades by feminists, liberals, socialists, gay rights activists, trans activists, etc.\u00a0 In fact, if you look at the best-known embodiments of traditional masculine values, as portrayed on the cinema screen, you\u2019ll see that their hero Trump displays none of those values himself.\u00a0 He falls laughably short in comparison.\u00a0 Imagine how he\u2019d<\/em> react and behave if he were in the shoes of Hollywood\u2019s most famous macho-men during their most famous movies.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Gordon Company \/ Silver Pictures \/ 20th<\/sup> Century Fox <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Take Bruce Willis, for example \u2013 an actor who\u2019s well-known for his conservative leanings but who hasn\u2019t, despite scurrilous rumours<\/a>, shown much enthusiasm for Trump.\u00a0 As Detective John McClane in Die Hard<\/em> (1988), Willis attends a Christmas party being held in a skyscraper by the company that employs his estranged wife.\u00a0 There\u2019s an unwanted festive surprise when a gang of German terrorists show up, seize the building and hold the partygoers hostage.\u00a0 McClane, who blames the company for his marriage\u2019s break-up and wasn\u2019t feeling comfortable at the party, nonetheless ducks into the nearest ventilation shaft and spends the film crawling around and picking off the terrorists one by one until order has been restored.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t imagine Trump selflessly doing any of that.\u00a0 Actually, someone of his orange bulk would manage to crawl about two inches along the ventilation shaft before getting stuck.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n No, Trump, the self-proclaimed master of \u2018the art of the deal\u2019, would be more like the character of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner).\u00a0 Ellis is a sleazy company executive who thinks he can bargain with the terrorists and get them to agree to a plan to lure McClane out of hiding.\u00a0 \u201cHey babe, I negotiate million dollar deals for breakfast!\u201d he brags in Trumpian fashion.\u00a0 \u201cI think I can handle this Eurotrash!\u201d\u00a0 Too late does the hapless Ellis realise that the terrorists have been stringing him along and don\u2019t intend to honour their side of the bargain.\u00a0 Inevitably, their leader, Vladimir Putin\u2026 sorry, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) puts a bullet through his head.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Or take Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who\u2019s publicly dissed<\/a> Trump for his appalling record on the environment.\u00a0 In Schwarzenegger\u2019s most famous role, as the reprogrammed-to-be-good Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day<\/em> (1991), Schwarzenegger realises at the movie\u2019s finale that the central processing unit in his head is the last remaining piece of technology that might enable the machines to take over the world.\u00a0 So, nobly, he decides he has to be destroyed for the good of humanity and asks Sarah and John Connor (Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong) to lower him into a vat of molten metal.\u00a0 Could you imagine Trump being so self-sacrificing?\u00a0 \u201cI am NOT going in that vat of molten metal!\u00a0 There\u2019s no CPU in my head!\u00a0 That\u2019s fake news!\u00a0 This is the most corrupt decision in the history of my country!\u00a0 This never happened to Obama\u2026!\u201d \u00a0And so on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Probably Trump would prefer to model himself on the bad<\/em> Terminator played by Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator<\/em> movie (1984), since that character has traits that the Gross Orange One admires: zero empathy, total ruthlessness, no qualms about using its arsenal of heavy-duty weaponry to blow away anything that defies it.\u00a0 However, with Trump as the Terminator, the movie would last five minutes.\u00a0 The Trump-Terminator arrives in 1984 Los Angeles\u2026\u00a0 Naked, it approaches a group of street-punks (including good old Bill Paxton, who exclaims, \u201cThis guy\u2019s a couple of cans short of a six-pack!<\/a>\u201d)\u2026\u00a0 Then the street-punks beat it to death.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 The Malpaso Company \/ Warner Bros<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Who else?\u00a0 Clint Eastwood, yet another Hollywood Republican who\u2019s been muted about Trump (and in 2020 promised to support<\/a> Mike Bloomberg if he became the Democrats\u2019 presidential candidate)?\u00a0 Eastwood built up his iconic macho persona during Sergio Leone\u2019s Dollars<\/em> trilogy in the 1960s.\u00a0 Not only was he The Man with No Name, but he was a man of few words.\u00a0 He\u2019d squint, keep his jaws clamped around a cigar and unnerve his opponents with a contemptuous silence.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t imagine a brash, loud gobshite like Trump, someone whose mouth is five minutes ahead of his brain, doing that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In fact, Eastwood in his other<\/em> most famous role, as Detective Harry Callaghan, aka Dirty Harry,\u00a0 offers advice in Magnum<\/em> Force<\/em> (1973) that Trump would have been wise to heed: \u201cMan\u2019s got to know his limitations<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n John Wayne?\u00a0 In Howard Hawks\u2019 Rio Bravo<\/em> (1959) and El Dorado<\/em> (1966), Wayne plays a town sheriff who\u2019s loyal to and protective of his staff \u2013 Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan in the earlier film, Robert Mitchum, James Caan and Arthur Hunicutt in the later.\u00a0 Even when Mitchum develops a severe alcohol problem in El Dorado<\/em>, Wayne puts up with his drunken bullshit and does his best to straighten the guy out.\u00a0 It\u2019s impossible to imagine the same of Trump, whose four-year tenure in the White House has seen a parade of cringing and crooked underlings being recruited and then, the moment they displease their master, being dumped again.\u00a0 The loyal-only-to-himself Trump would have pointed a finger at Mitchum and sneered, \u201cYou\u2019re fired!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Armada Productions \/ Warner Bros<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Steve McQueen?\u00a0 McQueen\u2019s most famous role was as the prisoner of war Hilts in The Great Escape<\/em> (1963), which would have earned him Trump\u2019s disgust immediately.\u00a0 As he once notoriously declared of John McCain, \u201cHe\u2019s a war hero because he was captured.\u00a0 I like heroes who weren\u2019t captured!\u201d\u00a0 In fact, McQueen breaks out of the POW camp in Escape<\/em> but then gets recaptured when his motorbike fails to clear a barbed wire fence on the Swiss border, which I suppose makes him a double loser in Trump\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In fact, Trump is devoid of the qualities I recognised in the masculine icons with whom I grew up: being loyal, being selfless, doing the right thing, playing fair, saying only things that are worth saying, sticking up for the underdog, being magnanimous in victory, being graceful in defeat.\u00a0 Then again, this is unsurprising when you see the Neanderthals who support him signalling their<\/em> masculinity by gathering in mobs outside state legislative buildings, clad in combat fatigues and totting automatic rifles, to protest the implementation of safety measures against Covid-19.\u00a0 These would-be warriors are too wimpy to countenance wearing small pieces of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to protect their fellow citizens.\u00a0 Clearly, their notions of masculinity have nothing to do with the qualities I\u2019ve listed above.\u00a0 Rather, they\u2019re all to do with intimidating, bullying and hurting people.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If that\u2019s what masculinity is about, I\u2019ll be glad to see the back of it.\u00a0 And I\u2019ll be especially glad to see the back of its biggest proponent, the one in the White House \u2013 who on January 20th<\/sup> goes from being the alpha-male to being the alpha-fail.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DH-poster.jpg\")
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