I'm not a violent man. What some people call "toxic masculinity," with reference to its principal trait, that being physical aggression, or so says theconversation.com, I tend to think of as mere stupidity. Even as a court-labeled specimen of teenaged incorrigibility I preferred negotiation to a fat lip, and my fellow hooligans' propensity to throw a punch rather than hurl a capital insult I deemed an opportunity sadly squandered.
Yet I seem to be regressing to the mindless wasteland of my masculine toxicity that never was. Every time I see some MAGA imbecile strutting around and popping off, I sense an irrepressible urge to punch the little prick in his dickheaded face. I even begin using his daycare-Riker Island vocabulary. Exhibit A: the convicted-then-pardoned Enrique Tarrio, a galactically ignorant man-child so proud of his boyish contemptibility he chooses to flaunt it in every fucking way.
Ah, the eloquence.
That of course was Tarrio in the clip, keeping his distance, you probably noted, from the courageous Capitol Hill officers who defended American democracy on J6 and yesterday were attending the Principles First summit in Washington, D.C. The event is named after that which neither Enrique nor his simpatico sugar daddy possesses any familiarity with. They compensate by increasing the volume of their stupidity, as well as its depth.
The summit's organizers were also treated to a bomb threat, its missive composed by one of Tarrio's "Patriot" comrades, as the ethically still-born president of the United States likes to call what the Principles First attendee called the man-child in the video: "a traitor."
"Emperor Trump." Pipe bombs replete with wire, black powder. Exploding bathrooms. The mother of a dutiful police officer who also deserves to die. Mailboxes ingeniously rigged to go boom. This sort of thing is beyond Trump's psychosis, a condition the emperor shares with the Mr. Tarrios of violent hard-ons. It's developmentally disabled psychosis.
And that brings me back to my inner masculinity wanting to go toxic. Better understandings of the truest, deepest nature of pathological Trumpism actually talk me down from those uncharacteristic face-punching impulses.
"Even those who expected the worst from [Trump's] reelection ... expected more rationality," writes The Atlantic's Jonathan Rauch. In the line there's an error: "more." There cannot be more when there is none. Rauch provides examples, among which are: "He has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general)."
Rauch's first example is key. Trump has appointed a small army of Enrique Tarrios to essential agencies — and Enrique Tarrio is a moron who happens to be severely unhinged as well. In short, the entirety of the Trump regime is punching itself in the face each and every bloody day. And so they sure as hell don't require a haymaker from me to deck themselves cold.