On my Nextdoor app, a resident of my town posted: “I am just wondering if anyone else has the same feeling as I do. I am sick and tired of seeing & hearing advertisements about men’s ejaculation problems and ads pertaining to women’s personal problems. Do children need to see and hear this? Call me ‘old fashion,’ but there are certain personal issues that should be kept private. I hope I haven’t offended anyone. I’m just venting. There is way too much violence, killings, etc. on TV these days. We only had ‘family shows,’ on TV. What are your feelings?

My response: “I am more sick and tired of seeing this president’s constant lies and bombing countries that are not in our national interest. Maybe if he took that erectile dysfunction medication more often and ejaculated more through his penis, he wouldn’t have to overcompensate by ordering the ejaculation of bombs from his big thick jet planes.”

Related

Trump slammed as “addled psycho” for gushing about White House drapes after attacking Iran

“Actual war is much more problematic and traumatic for children than the fictional violence on TV shows,” I added. “Those ‘family shows’ we were subjected to in the 1950s and 1960s were lies.”

“They manufactured a fairytale world populated by white middle-class people living in beautiful houses with perfectly manicured lawns and fathers going to well-paying jobs as the mothers stayed home cleaning the house while wearing a tasteful single strand of pearls.”

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“Under the façade and beneath the lie, father did not actually know best, and in real life, Bud, the son, was a drug addict! And who would really leave it to Beaver or Dennis the Menace? And the father on the Brady Bunch hated his role on the show while living a double life as a gay man away from the glare of the cameras.”

“And this is what MAGA is all about: getting back to a time that never existed but only in the minds of those who long for a patriarchal hetero- and cisnational Christian white supremacist United States of America.”

The big lies

After the death and injuries of human beings and all other living things, after the psychological pain and trauma to children and adults alike, after the destruction of nature and personal property, one of the biggest horrors and tragedies of war is the death of truth.

President Donald Trump, as the clinically compulsive liar that he is, shouted yet another of his big lies when he claimed that he and Netanyahu decided to go to war with Iran because it served our country’s self-interest due to the “imminent threat” Iran posed to the United States and to the world community. But there was no imminent threat.

Trump lied that Iran was very close to producing a nuclear weapon. That is not true.

He lied during his recent State of the Union address when he said that Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.” That threat is more likely to come from Russia and China.

He lied that he was trying to free the Iranian people from a repressive regime and bring democracy to the region. This empathy-challenged narcissist has little concern for others and his anti-democratic policies and actions betray his words.

Then-private citizen Trump essentially foreshadowed his own future intentions on social media in October 2012: “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin – watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.”

Later that month, he wrote, “Don’t let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected–be careful Republicans!”

In November, he wrote, “Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!”

And about a year later, he brought it up again: “Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!”

Yet Obama did not strike Iran. Trump did.

So, what were his true justifications for breaking his campaign pledge to not go to war with Iran and never engage the United States in “forever wars”?

On the Australia Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Business” program, Rabobank’s senior macro strategist, Ben Picton, explained the geopolitical implications of the US strikes on Iran, which chiefly includes taking over a supply chain leverage of oil against China.

Picton asserts that it is right to question whether oil is a key part of the U.S. motivation for its war against Iran.

“The United States clearly is very eager to have control of the oil supply chain,” he said. “We’ve seen the intervention in Venezuela. Now we’re seeing intervention in Iran.”  

He reminded us that Iran, being an ally of both China and Russia, has provided those countries with cheap oil, especially China, for a long time.

“The best way to understand what is happening is that the United States is looking for leverage in its competition with China,” he says. “China has leverage over the United States because it controls the supply chain for rare earths. The United States now controls the supply chain for energy, and that is a pressure point that it can press in this confrontation with China.”

In addition to Picton’s prognostication, we can ask how much oil and rare earths does the Grifter-In-Chief in the Oval Office expect to extort from Iran into the United States and into his personal bank accounts?

While President Joe Biden was largely ineffective in stopping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-right-wing regime from their mass slaughter of innocent Palestinians and others in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, he did organize and maintain an efficient alliance against Putin’s aggression, helping to keep Ukraine afloat and resilient in the face of Putin’s belligerence.

Trump, on the other hand, has acted in lockstep with Netanyahu’s long sought war with Iran. In the meantime, he has abandoned Ukraine to the brutality of the Putin regime’s sovereignty-crushing attempts to absorb Ukrainian territory.

Militarism, masculinity, & Donald Trump

What is patriarchy? A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its aspects the oppression of women. -Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

Commentators have written of Trump’s character and personality flaws. We cannot, however, understand the motivational factors directing his words and actions without investigating the socially-constructed and maintained characteristics of gender.

All people in our society, no matter our sex assigned at birth, are saddled with the heavy burden – yes, burden – of the “masculine/feminine” binary system. Concepts of masculinity and femininity promote the domination of males over females and reinforce the identification of maleness with power. Assigned males are encouraged to be independent, competitive, goal oriented, and unemotional, to value physical and mental courage, toughness, and even violence.

Assigned females, on the other hand, are taught to be nurturing, emotional, sensitive, and expressive, to be caretakers of others while disregarding their own needs.

Society mandates that males must be “in control.” They cannot get too close to their feelings, and if they do, they certainly cannot allow them to show. They must “keep it all together” and “suck it up.” They cannot show vulnerability, awkwardness, or doubts. Apologizing or even admitting errors goes against this male social grain. They must be “on top,” in bed and out. 

Though ultimately unattainable for any male, the deceptive rabbit of masculinity circulates around their track of life on patriarchal wires that project the alluringly tasty rewards of control, security, and independence, but only if they perpetually compete in the race. 

Trump has embraced the masculine alpha social role to its extreme.

Toxic forms of hypermasculinity require the promotion and use of firearms to keep at bay the intensive psychosocial compulsive fear and dread of penetration from bullets, from homosexuals, and from the female gaze, since patriarchy promises males the right to the aggressive gaze, the right of penetration of “others.”

Laws reflect the society in which they are meant to affect. Patriarchal individualistic societies oppress and inhibit women’s reproductive freedoms, encourage the inequities in salaries between men and women, establish and maintain the massive development of wealth for a very few while encouraging the enormous financial disparities between the very rich and everyone else, and often promote violence and wars.  

Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford University discusses the link between masculinity and war. Though he concedes that women too fight in the more liberal nations on the frontlines and serve as heads of state and military strategists, history shows that it has largely been men who determine and fight wars.   

“There is much talk about violations, cruelty and brutality in the public discussion of war, but very little talk about men, ” he wrote in 2018 for Humanitarian Law & Policy. “Yet, factually speaking, it is mainly men who are the practitioners of organized violence as its ideologues, planners, technical designers, and its workforce at the sharp end.”

Slim argues further that, “The cultures and institutions that prepare for and deliver organized armed violence on behalf of the State or non-State armed groups are predominantly constructed by men, led by men and filled with men.”

Historically, the problem has not necessarily been men, or even the overarching notion of masculinity. The problem, rather, lies in the system of patriarchy, which harms everyone. We must, therefore, learn how this system is structured and how it works in order to disassemble and eliminate it.

Fortunately, a new generation is challenging the system by revolutionizing our understanding of gender identity and expression. They are shaking up traditionally dichotomous binary notions of male/female, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight. 

Unfortunately, Trump never got the memo. But if he had, he never would have read it.

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