Which Way, Western Wuss?

Once upon a time, six bros threatened me on the hard streets of Sarasota. I was a college stripling crossing their path, and they performed male rage for each other by pretending I didn’t get out of their way. I snorted, and one of them called me the F-slur and reached for the back of his chinos as if going for a gun.

I was with a friend who had survived both a bear attack and being flung off his motorcycle, so it shouldn’t have surprised me to see him ask, “Oh! You have a gun! May I see it?” with a shit-eating grin. Apart from, “Is it small?” I’ve forgotten the rest of the questions he peppered them with; despite outnumbering us, the gun never appeared and they suddenly melted away toward a Shell station. I mention this because I can only assume every one of the assailants now hosts a successful conservative podcast called “Patriot War with Aryan Todd,” and is scared shitless at the thought of having to exit their vehicles in any American city. Because if there is one attitude that serves as the wellspring for the modern Republican Party, it is being a puling pants-pissing weenie.

On Monday, Donald Trump announced his intention to take over law enforcement in the District of Columbia, citing a crime wave that isn’t happening, hasn’t in most American cities for a generation and is contradicted by FBI numbers released by his own hired goon. His inspiration seems to be seeing unhoused people from his car and a segment on Fox News. But, since right-wing punditry now consists of acting like the groom of the stool without the king’s respect or the millions of dollars, one of the GOP’s twerpier avatars, Human Events editor Will Chamberlain, naturally told everyone how right the king is. “I brought my family to D.C. for the Cherry Blossom festival,” he wrote on Elon Musk’s neo-Nazi funhouse. “The first thing I saw when I exited the L’Enfant Plaza Metro was a gang of youths driving ATVs down the street, one of whom was doing a wheelie.”

A wheelie? My goodness, do you need to go to the hospital?

One’s first impulse is to argue with this sort of thing. If kids doing wheelies makes them dangerous, then the far greater number of kids tearing around at an incline in suburban and rural America ought to drive us into the urban cores. Or is the problem just kids on vehicles in general? If it were four unicyclists, would that be four times more threatening? When Chamberlain watches the 1986 BMX masterpiece “Rad” and gets to the point where Cru tells Lori Loughlin, “God, what I wouldn’t give to go ass-sliding with you right now,” does he assume this is a homicidal gang of fixie-mounted sodomites?

Then there’s the crime data. We could talk about how Trump expressed a willingness to do this to Baltimore next — a Black city with a Black mayor — despite the city driving violent crime down to an astonishing degree by eschewing the eternal “more cops” solution and instead treating it like a public health issue. We could talk about how, if you were born in 1990, the crime rate has declined for almost every year of your life, barring a pandemic-induced hiccup. We could talk about how firearm death rates are higher in rural areas, or that you’re more likely to get murdered in Pick A Red State than in New York City. Or we could talk about how most crime data is often an unacknowledged measure of who, what and where we choose to police, as well as of who lacks the resources to successfully contest arrests in court.

Those are all fine second-order thoughts. So are contending that these misuses of law enforcement resources come with an opportunity cost in the form of serious crimes going unmonitored or uninvestigated and that these actions represent another instance of All the President’s Mediocrities blowing through the budget to try to force reality to resemble the daydreams of a demented racist dunce. Further, you wouldn’t be wrong to argue that this D.C. takeover represents another step in Trump’s process of slow-boiling the frog to acclimate Americans to illegal federal occupations, which he wants to impose on more American cities. Whether you then want to contend that Trump’s motivation doesn’t come from his typical fatheaded eugenicist loathing of people of color or people living on the streets and instead is meant to militarily occupy the same district where Congress will vote on releasing the Epstein files is up to you.

With the exception of that last detail, engaging with Trump’s actions in this way cedes the debate to conservatives’ ground. Burrowing into the crime data and laboring to refute conservative anecdata passively concedes that, at some point, it is legitimate for the president to occupy an American city to respond to an emergency that so very plainly isn’t happening, that begins and ends in his declaration of it. 

The best reaction to comical conservative anecdata about American cities descending into a Hobbesian war of all against all is far simpler: “What a total wuss.” Essentially every member of and mouthpiece for the Republican Party has made a point of declaring that they are more frightened of New York City than a million kids who walk and take public transit to school there every day. 

That’s pathetic — and funny. It’s hysterical that a party of manly men scream to the entire world that they are the hard men who can rescue a humiliated republic and are also scared to death to ride a subway that six-figures worth of grandparents use per day. Those same hard men claiming that transgender teachers, inclusive and responsible historiography, and basic empathy will end masculinity will also tell you that their gun ownership makes them society’s protector, while also proclaiming themselves utterly terrified of stories they’ve told themselves about what happens if you ever leave your house or your car. 

The root hypocrisy of fascism is that it brings to power supermen who are supposedly capable of meeting any threat, but whose unceasing message is that they are threatened by anything and everything. You can’t break all the laws without making up existential threats, and so America is on the verge of total collapse (while criticizing it verges on treason). Liberals complain about not liking fish pictures in dating profiles, but real men solve real problems and read the Western canon, while also pissing and moaning about Hollywood casting decisions. The avatar of heroic hetero masculinity worries that liking his wife too much might make him gay.

The media, by and large, treats this kind of rough manly pants-pissing with helicopter-parenting levels of concern. The possibility that conservatives’ fears and claims might be baseless takes a backseat to the first-order op-ed page problem of their existence in the first place. Their essential realness as Americans confers their “fear” with the status of a valid other side by default. Whichever number makes crime appear worse — the raw, the per capita or the percentage-increase — will be used, while crime reductions get cameo treatment. Despite standing a generation removed from the last traces of “Death Wish” New York, their vision of the city is a million victims and one vigilante surrounded by 10 million animals. Los Angeles, meanwhile, is part Rodney King riots, part “Boyz n the Hood” and part “Predator 2.” Regarding that last one, you can take the most genteel, pinky-extended publication and turn to their crime coverage, and they’re a lot closer than they’d like to admit to being a sweating Morton Downey Jr. screaming about The Jamaican Voodoo Posse.

No one should continue to play along with this, because what’s happening in D.C. and L.A. lives at the end of this train of thought. The same people who ridicule women’s expressions of trauma are not entitled to be soothed every time they claim to suffer PTSD in response to their own daydreams and email forwards that cite the Fabulist Cuck newswire. Those claiming to save an America under attack do not get to void the nation’s promises to people they dislike because they have overactive imaginations. And a dainty-fingered Broadway-obsessed draft dodger who likened the clap to combat doesn’t get to become a warrior because his appointed drunk at the Department of Defense says he is. 

What he should get is made fun of and refused. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the ridicule and the credibility gap. Whining is not a mandate.