Monday, May 1, 2017

Considering the Source, Ironic Advice for College Age Men

...Joe Biden, who is out and about talking to guys the way guys talk to guys or so Joe Biden seems to think is the way guys talk to guys.

Thanks to a variety of sources, here's the irony:

Washington Post:  What are we going to do about Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
and
U.K. Telegraph:  'Creepy Veep' Joe Biden 'nuzzles' wife of colleague and claims he is friends with lots of Somali cab drivers

If he were an Episcopal priest, he would be brought before the ecclesial court for "corrective therapy".

Okay, here's my two cents.  I guess I've been in locker rooms, too, through the years, although I'm not as likely to gleefully crow about it as does the former vice-president, and have almost never heard another man talk in any detail about his..um...technique with the other gender.

In the Marines, we were usually too sleepy or exhausted to talk and, besides, we did everything on the double and verbalization was a waste of time.  In my current gym, if we speak to one another at all, it's usually about correcting our dead lifting.  Back in the days when I would play team sports, we would either talk about strategy before the game or celebrate or commiserate after the game.  This makes me wonder if the former VP has ever, actually, been in a locker room or has simply been in a "locker room of the mind".

This would correspond with my impression from the only time that I ever saw him.  It was a number of years ago, now.  He was seated by himself in a car of the Acela train, half of it having been cleared by the Secret Service.  No one sat with or near him.  He had no newspaper, computer, or book.  He stared not out of the windows, but straight ahead at nothing.  He looked old, frail, and confused.  If he had been traveling by himself, and were not a prominent politician, I would have asked if he needed help or at least tried to conjure up a conversation with him.  He reminded me of that man on the news a couple of decades ago whose family would leave him at some Florida dog racing track each day with his name and address pinned to his sweater.

What is more likely, especially as it comes from a Washington insider, is that he is repeating what has been placed before him to repeat: An artificial image that is popular in his circle, that of the sexually brutal "other" who speaks ill of women and celebrates his common designs on their virtue.  The "other" probably voted with the wrong political party, too.  This is especially true of the college-age male, a group that is currently regarded as terminally disharmonious in the Orwellian Utopia of higher education.

It's interesting that, as more women than men study in colleges, earn academic degrees, and receive the bulk of scholarships and grants, there is a need for women still to be portrayed as minority victims in a brutalist culture.  It's as if an entire body of administrators, and their political enablers, had their livelihood dependent upon that perspective.