Trump and the "wannabe manliness" of his administration

The Trump administration is certainly giving us an education in the varieties of wannabe manliness.

There is the slovenly “I don’t care what you think” manliness of Steve Bannon. There’s the look-at-me-I-can-curse manliness that Anthony Scaramucci learned from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” There is the affirmation-hungry “I long to be the man my father was” parody of manliness performed by Donald Trump. There are all those authentically manly Marine generals Trump hires to supplement his own. There’s Trump’s man-crush on Vladimir Putin and the firing of insufficiently manly Reince Priebus.

With this crowd, it’s man-craving all the way down.

It’s worth remembering, when we are surrounded by all this thrusting masculinity, what substantive manliness once looked like. For example, 2,400 years ago the Greeks had a more fully developed vision of manliness than anything we see in or around the White House today.

Greek manliness started from a different place than ours does now. For the ancient Greeks, it would have been incomprehensible to count yourself an alpha male simply because you can run a trading floor or sell an apartment because you gilded a faucet handle.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:Gorka or mclovin, who wore it better?

Anyway, buried in this fluff piece was a picture and a description of Gorka’s EDC, or “everyday carry” items. There are myriad places on the internet, including an r/EDC subreddit, dedicated to showing off and parsing people’s EDCs. Some can be pretty interesting. What does a medical student carry every day? How about a city firefighter? How does that compare to a volunteer firefighter in the country?

Then you have groupies like Gorka, a man whose entire self-image is cobbled out of pieces of man-flair. He’s a guy who drives a Ford Mustang — but the downscale 4-cylinder. He buys a vanity plate extolling the virtues of The Art of War, the ancient Sun Tzu text that keeps getting reprinted because it helps keep second lieutenants occupied while their soldiers put together a battle plan.