-Caveat Lector- January 26, 2003 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/opinion/26DOWD.html?ex=1044589735 &ei=1&en=180beee0adbbb86a Portrait of a Laddie
By MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON — On this, our annual Sunday saturnalia of manliness, we will see a lot of body-slamming, nacho-gorging and beer-hawking. There will be chesty warriors on the field and chestier babes on the tube, selling suds by enacting male fantasies — erotic mud wrestling in bikinis, Polish blond twins in tank tops, the usual subtle appeals to the male cortex. Behind all these tableaus of testosterone, a disturbing question lurks: Are men losing interest in sex? Women's libidos may be surpassing men's, USA Today says. Now it is the men who plead headaches and the women who feel grumpy, deprived and inclined to cheat. "Sex therapists, researchers and marital counselors — as well as some divorce lawyers — are concerned about increasing numbers of men of all ages who rarely desire their wives sexually or rarely have sexual fantasies because of a variety of physical and emotional factors," the paper reported on Wednesday. What will happen if men, the mindlessly lusting sex, turn into the reflectively listless sex? With relief, I suddenly remembered that America will never have to worry about spiraling into impotence as long as we have . . . Rummy! Square-jawed, man's man Rummy has been so out-of-control macho lately, he pulls up the curve on swaggering for his whole gender. First he dissed veterans, a key Republican constituency, saying that Vietnam draftees had added "no value, no advantage" to the U.S. services. Then he announced that he was going to start broadcasting his daily Pentagon briefings in Arabic to the Iraqis, confident that they'll fall into line once they're exposed to his two-fisted American bravado. Still full of vinegar, he began smacking around whole countries. He called France and Germany "old Europe," as if they were a rundown theme park, and embraced the modernity and gravity of Bulgaria and Romania. The French finance minister, Francis Mer, sniffed that he was "profoundly vexed." Even before Rummy mocked them, officials in Paris and Berlin were mocking President Bush's pious, peremptory ways on Iraq, saying they found his tone too Texas and too religious. "Much of it is the way he talks, this provocative manner, the jabbing of his finger at you," a German Parliament member, Hans-Ulrich Klose, told The Times's David Sanger. (Who knew the Germans were such delicate, easily intimidated creatures?) The rift is redolent of Henry James's novels, a collision between the new world and the old, the headstrong, uncultured Americans and the cynical, snobbish Europeans. The brash Americans are eager to launch a voyage of Arab emancipation, and the world-weary Europeans want to smother what they see as irritating Yankee optimism. The way the French and German foreign ministers set up the secretary of state on Monday, by luring him to a U.N. session to declare that they would not support an early move on Iraq, was straight out of "The Portrait of a Lady," with Colin Powell as Isabel Archer, seduced and betrayed by the bloodless machinations of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. Mr. Powell was so livid he jumped to the whack-Iraq side, snapping at the council, "We cannot be shocked into impotence." American support for invading Iraq has slipped. But if the French and Germans can turn the administration's flower child hawk-y, who knows what else they can accomplish with their condescending yapping? Even if the "axis of weasel," as The New York Post calls the skittish allies, has a point, who wants to hear it? The allies have no moral authority on the subject of standing up to tyrants who invade their neighbors and gas their own people. And they have no interest, as American conservatives do, in helping Israel by getting rid of Saddam. At last, Mr. Bush has found a compelling rationale for his Iraq policy: France and Germany are against it. In my last column, I cited a Time article reporting that the president had "quietly reinstated" a custom of sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial. Time has since corrected the story, saying he didn't revive the custom, but simply continued it. I would still ask: Why keep a tradition of honoring the Confederacy while you're going to court to stop a tradition of helping black students at the University of Michigan? Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy Forwarded for your information. 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