Headcase - Glennzilla’s new book

My favorite blogger is Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. A former constitutional law attorney, Greenwald is the best example I know of the way Internet writers are taking over the responsibility abdicated by mainstream reporters.

Greenwald, called “Glennzilla” because of his rampaging style, is a reporter in the truest sense of the word. His concern is writing the brutal truth – not performing the brainless stenography of reporters who refuse to separate facts from spin. In the average newspaper today, the truth doesn’t matter. No fact exists outside the spin of ideological context. Thus the best lie becomes accepted as a reasonable facsimile of the truth.

Greenwald, who has authored three books, is at his best when he’s documenting the commonly accepted lies of American politics. His latest book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, doesn’t report a great deal that regular readers of his column haven’t already learned. But reading so many lies threaded together by an explanatory and outraged narrative is almost exhilarating.

I’m not sure why Greenwald doesn’t say so more explicitly – perhaps to avoid complicating his tale with a controversial meme – but Great American Hypocrites is as much a critique of our broad cultural notions of masculinity as it is of Republican hypocrisy.

It’s not well known, but Greenwald is gay and lives in Brazil with his partner, whom he acknowledges in this book. Although gay men are fond these days of claiming that their gender identification is unaffected by their sexual orientation, a comprehensive recent study at Northwestern University reached a different conclusion. A significant majority of gay men and women demonstrate gender nonconformity as children and pre-adolescents.

I mention this because I couldn’t help wondering if a heterosexual man could write a book like Great American Hypocrites with the same intensity of outrage. Greenwald’s first chapter in this book is a takedown of actor John Wayne, who has remained even in death the prototype of hypermasculinity that has become the favored image of Republicans.

Greenwald discloses Wayne’s real life. Although a boisterous advocate of the Vietnam War, he went to extraordinary lengths to avoid serving during World War II himself. He was also a relentless moral crusader and gay-basher, condemning Tennessee Williams’ work and famously refusing a role in All the King’s Men on moral grounds. Meanwhile, he was a serial adulterer and was repeatedly accused of domestic violence.

Greenwald makes the point that almost without exception, Republican leaders assume this same guise of the moralist to hide their own decadence. Because they can’t control themselves, they try to control the rest of us. Likewise, because they are so insecure in their masculinity, lacking anything like genuine “warrior courage,” they dispatch surrogates to fight brutal, pointless wars, like the Iraq invasion. These are the same bullies who beat up gay kids on the playground and ran for their mothers’ protection the moment anyone fought back. Gay people see this myth of the tough guy clearly in the Republican leadership.

Greenwald makes a fascinating point about the Republican fondness for pointless war. He demonstrates, with one stunning quote after another from publications such as The National Review, that the cheerleaders for war regard themselves as soldiers as well. This isn’t just a metaphorical claim. When people such as President Bush, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh are called “chicken hawks,” they are unfazed because they see themselves as part of the actual battle.

The best-known example is George Bush’s donning a pilot’s uniform (replete with codpiece) and strutting about an aircraft carrier festooned with a sign proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” soon after the Iraq invasion. Greenwald quotes Chris Matthews and other supposedly “objective” news people and pundits swooning over Bush’s silly phallic swaggering.

Greenwald takes apart each of the phony guises of Republicans, including their particularly outrageous claim to favor small government, when they have extended the federal government’s reach into our personal lives to an unprecedented extent. He ends his book with a profile of John McCain’s transformation into George Bush’s double, a colossal hypocrite who is protected by American media.

Perhaps it’s more appropriately the work of feminism and so-called queer theory to propose remedies to the gender stereotyping that Greenwald demonstrates to have caused such suffering in our time. By all means, read this illuminating book but also ask yourself, as you read it, how we can get beyond the stereotypes so gender does not function as a mask of deceit and authoritarian control.

Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology. For information on his private practice, go to www.cliffbostock.com.