Pervert Politics: Trumpism's Body Obsessions

[Nevilledog]

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/pervert-politics-trumpisms-body-obsessions/

Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We're playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the President and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be.

This is how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed the country on Wednesday in a press conference about the ongoing war with Iran. It was a lurid, machismo-driven appearance that almost smelled of bloodlust through the screen. As MS NOW commentator Mika Brzezinski described it, it was “a childish litany of accomplishments…a lot of rhetoric about death and destruction and power, and no real reasoning about what the immediate threat was.”

Hegseth’s focus on the imagery of pain and ruin echoed Trump’s State of the Union last week, in which the president repeatedly described the bodily suffering of various individuals, including U.S. servicemembers. Trump offered the image of West Virginia National Guardsman Andrew Wolfe, the victim of a November shooting in D.C., in his hospital bed with “blood all over.” He detailed the injuries of Eric Slover, a member of the strike force that seized Maduro earlier this year, by saying, “He absorbed four agonizing shots, shredding his leg into pieces.”

Throughout the speech, one was left with the clear sense that Trump was at his most animated when describing the bloodied and mangled bodies of other people. This obsession with the body—and particularly with the body as the subject of serious injury, even death—is a hallmark of right-wing politics in America.

I’ve written in the past about how Hegseth’s vision of the American military is preoccupied with an ideal of the male form—one that’s a kind of modern mishmash of Spartan imagery and homoerotic fascist machismo. But that is only one facet of the Trumpian right’s fixation on the body. Another example is the now well-known phenomenon of Mar-A-Lago Face, wherein the women of the right doctor their appearances with filler, cosmetic surgeries, and absurd excesses of makeup. My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has astutely observed that the prevalence of steroid use and plastic surgery on the right constitutes its own form of gender-affirming care in an era of reactionary fantasies.

*snip*

[leftstreet]

1. That was a really creepy read

Thanks for posting

I think

[Maru Kitteh]

2. "steroid use and plastic surgery on the right constitutes its own form of gender-affirming care"

This is brilliant, and true.

[Norrrm]

3. In Pursuit of a 'Warrior Ethos,' Hegseth sent the NG to Wash DC for trash pickup and landscaping.