Category Politics/Culture

So it’s a tough time to be a guy in this world, yes? Our “brand,” as it were, has become rather tarnished of late, not that it was ever all that lofty to begin with. After all, the other half of the population—the distaff portion, the XXs, our “better” halves—have been hip for quite a few millennia now to the mess we keep making of things, the brutal competition for food and land and the upper hand in every argument. Our romance with war.

They’ve worked around us as best they could, even with the stark disadvantage of their smaller stature that has proved decisive when the distribution of power has been determined by purely physical means. But this uneven distribution has consigned them to live in a sort of hell of our making, shunted off to the sidelines as men went about shaping the world in their own image.

This includes men’s notions of the God above who thunders and blusters and roars i...

What could possibly be in the minds of Trump voters? Not only those who cast a ballot for him in 2016, but also those who have stayed by him since then, given that everything Democrats and many-if-not-most establishment Republicans knew would happen under such an obviously unqualified, tempestuous and malformed character has come to pass.

Broken promises, unrelenting self-aggrandizement, frayed international relations, bellicose nationalism, schoolyard taunting, tax cuts for the ruling class, disdain for the environment, chaos, vindictiveness and bullying as policy—all of this has indeed happened, and even been doubled down on through the president’s first 10 months in office.

Wondering how Trump voters continue to countenance all this has been the billion dollar question as our world careens and liberals try their best not to wake up every morning with yet another Trump hangover and visions of a fut...

With all due respect for how to best register one’s views on the great issues of the day by adopting one or another postural position during the playing of the National Anthem, I fear President Trump’s odious and frightening comments on NFL game rules are being drowned out. That’s a shame, because his views reveal willful disregard not only for the dead-serious problem of brain injuries in NFL players, but also the larger issue of violence as entertainment and opiate for the masses.

For all of the president’s characteristic crudity in using his bully pulpit to call out “sons of bitches” who take a knee or stay in the locker room during the anthem, he exhibited even more hopelessly warped views in the following segment from the same incendiary speech:

“When the NFL ratings are down massively, massively. The NFL ratings are down massively...