Maleness makes a comeback

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Has a shocked society rediscovered the value of traditional masculinity in the rubble of the World Trade Center?

Peggy Noonan thinks so. In a phone interview with United Press International, the former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush expanded on the theme she developed in her Oct. 12 Wall Street Journal Column, "Welcome Back, Duke: From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues."

"Duke" referred to the screen persona of John Wayne, formerly iconic but long an object of derision among degreed baby boomers.

The extraordinary assault on traditional masculinity that occurred in the West during the last third of the 20th century can be understood only in its historical context.

For untold millennia, the male role had been that of protector and provider. Parents reared their sons to stoically endure the hardships that inhere in these tasks.

Eloquence could be prized, especially in the exercise of leadership, but men were not expected to expand on their misgivings. When danger looms, women and children are not reassured by male equivocation.

But the generation born after World War II enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity. In the United States, the GI Bill of 1944 created the largest middle class of the industrial age. Baby boomers were the first children since pre-feudal times not to have to worry about where the rent money would come from.

Their parents' generation had been so damaged by the Depression that fully a third of World War II draftees were rejected because of ill health or debility. However, relatively few boomers -- and almost none of those involved in the reevaluation of sex roles -- suffered from poor food or the lack of medical care.

Biologists call these conditions of "relaxed selection," in which individuals who might otherwise have died survive to pass on maladaptive traits to their offspring. Cultures as well as biological populations can acquire maladaptive traits in the absence of selective pressures, when the penalty for crazy ideas is less than social extinction.

Winning the Vietnam War was not essential to the survival of the United States. It was during this long conflict that boomer elites challenged the ideal of male service and self-sacrifice in the face of danger.

The "strong, silent type," once a male cultural ideal, was redefined as emotionally abusive. Being a strong, silent man was suddenly grounds for divorce.

"Male-bashing was a poisonous feature of American feminism for 30 years," Camille Paglia, a professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts told UPI. "Every sexual minority is glorified by campus gender studies -- from gays to transsexuals -- but the masculine heterosexual man gets no respect. He is blamed for all the evils of history," said the gadfly intellectual.

A survey published in Lingua Franca magazine named Paglia's "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" the number one academic book of the 1990s.

"Campus leftism claims to speak for the common man, but it's been totally blind to the natural, vigorous masculinity of working-class men, whose labor and courage sustain the complex infrastructure enjoyed by the effete upper middle class," Paglia said.

"The sacrifice, energy, and tenacity of the virile rescue workers at the World Trade Center disaster site have dramatically demonstrated the pathetic vulnerability, self-deception, and parasitism of the modern professional class," the professor said.

In her column on Friday, Noonan said members of New York's information elite have a new respect for the firemen, welders and construction workers who extinguished the blaze, are digging out the rubble and will build whatever will take its place.

She wrote that this is "very good for our country" because, among other benefits, "manliness wins wars."

Noonan told UPI that historians will look back on Sept. 11, 2001, as a great cultural demarcation point -- "a sobering jolt to the American system that actually changed the way that organism operates.

"You simply cannot underestimate the extent to which people have understood this is a God-involved moment," she said, estimating that some 80 percent of the people she has encountered "in this heathen city" are responding on some spiritual level.

"That is a huge cultural shift on its own, but it will by necessity bring others," said Noonan, who reported that she experienced the tragedy theologically.

"For instance, when you remember that God is the father, and you think of the young fathers in the NYFD who slapped on their 20-pound rubber coats and picked up that 30-pound hose and took the ax and ran 40 flights up the stairs to save lives, you cannot fail to remember -- at least unconsciously -- what men are."

Noonan defined a masculine man not as "a big guy with muscles" but rather as "a guy who sees trouble and takes responsibility and saves people who are smaller or weaker or more frightened in the world."

She thinks that this masculine style is not only back but will prevail and will mark the coming age.

Of course, that remains to be seen.

British historian Corelli Barnett has observed that war is the great auditor of institutions. If the account books of our culture have been balanced at a cost of casualties in the thousands rather than in the hundreds of thousands or more, we can consider ourselves lucky.