Effeminate masculinity on full blast at the White House lawn
Joseph Heller’s Main Argument
There is a delightful Catch-22 at the heart of the White House’s 250th birthday plans, and it goes like this: the louder a man insists on his masculinity, the more he advertises his suspicion that he hasn’t got any. To prove you don’t need to prove it, you must never try. To try is to confess. And so the only men truly secure in their manhood are the ones who would never dream of building an octagonal UFC cage on the South Lawn—which means the cage itself is the tell.
We are asked to read the spectacle—the fighting cage, the “Patriot Games,” the garden of muscular bronze heroes—as a triumphant return to virility. But virility that needs a press release is like courage that needs a permission slip. The strongman who must stage his strength has already lost the argument; he is performing for an audience he hopes will not notice the performance.
History is unkind to such men. Nero, that most insecure of emperors, entered the Olympic chariot race, fell out of his chariot, failed to finish, and was crowned victor anyway—by judges who valued their lives. Rome did not see a champion. Rome saw a frightened man buying a laurel he could not earn, and snickered behind its togas. Napoleon, similarly, snatched the crown from the Pope’s hands to place it on his own head, a gesture meant to scream sovereignty and instead whispering insecurity.
So let the cage go up. Let the bronze men flex. Each rivet is a small confession. We get it. It’s complex. But there is nothing so unmanly as a man straining to be seen as a man—and nothing so American, apparently, as requiring ticket admission to watch him try.
Yossarian’s Guilt-Laden Rebuttal (Woman’s Other Perspective)
And yet the second half of the trap snaps shut just as neatly: if there is nothing so unmanly as a man straining to be seen as a man, there is also nothing women reward so reliably as a man straining to be seen at all—so the gladiator games, effeminate to their last rivet, may win the very admiration their effeminacy should forfeit, the suitor succeeding precisely because he was foolish enough to try.
Brief, Tempestuous Conclusion
As an aside, the UFC is apparently funding the White House cage match. That does change the dynamic a bit, especially given the numerous statues erected along the Mall ridiculing Trump. The glorifying of violence and traumatic brain injury is still too hefty a price to pay, but that the gladiator bloodsport is not ours to foot neutralizes the sting.
