Friday, March 30, 2012

The Undescended Perplex


I know I'm going out on a limb here by bringing a dubious biological determinism to bear on what should be merely a political question. But has anyone else noticed something about many of the movers and shakers of right wing Republicanism: namely, that their testicles don't appear to have descended? 
     I am not questioning their masculinity, nor their sexual orientation. Many of them -- no, I venture to say all of them -- are sound family men.    
     But what I wonder about is the connection between delayed sexual development and a certain variety of right wing operative. Not the bullyboy opportunists who bombilate less out of conviction than an ambition to persuade the Koch brothers that they should have their own PAC, or land a show on Fox News. 
     I mean the fellows who really, really mean it. 
     Go down the list: Ralph Reed, Rush Limbaugh, Lindsey Graham, Newt Gingrich, Orrin Hatch, Bobby Jindal, Mitch McConnell, Antonin Scalia, Edwin Feulner, Rich Lowry, James Dobson, Tucker Carlson, Tony Perkins, or almost any of the leading lights who run the right-wing think tanks that dot the office parks of Falls Church, Virginia. None of them look their age. None of them look any age. By the time they enter their fifties, they seem as developmentally truncated as embalmed babies. Is it merely coincidental that they have that same pallid, barren, Dorian-Gray quality one usually associates with men of the cloth?
     What is the connection between a failure to entirely adolesce and the tendency to embrace one's parents' conservatism? Is there something about these piping, smooth-browed, apple-cheeked debate-club late-bloomers, that may account for their politics? From whence derives their fawning identification with the rich and powerful? 
     I'm only asking. But maybe by asking I've gone too far, and an apology is in order. Not to them, necessarily, but to you for broaching the subject of Newt Gingrich's testicles. 
     But I will say, in my defense, that at least I left Ann Coulter out of it.

No comments:

Post a Comment