"uh, professor, i think you better hustle over to drudge for a classic drudgetaposition."

Says Kit Carson in the comments to the 8:03 a.m. post. Drudge is featuring the new Rasmussen poll, which I've already blogged about here, but what's Drudgtapositionally interesting is Trump's pointing at a man's naked ass:



That "pulls into" is... cheeky.

Widening the frame, we see — in contrast to Trump's dominant and solitary finger — a mishmash of hands, one of which belongs to Obama:



"VIDEO: '3 Amigos' look like 3 Stooges during botched handshake..."

The intentionality of the the juxtapositioning is proved beyond dispute if we continue down the central column to find another dominant hand:



The big hand of Michael Phelps — 5 fingers for the 5th Olympic qualification.

So we have 2 big dominant hands — each starkly meaningful — bracketing the botched, muddled handsiness...



... of Obama, in Canada, with his globalizing friends Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto.

"The problem right now is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture."

"We’re in a period now where young people are being processed for the universities, and the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There’s no... nothing in the body...."

Said Camillle Paglia, in a conversation with Tyler Cowen, who'd asked here "For America, what should an ideal of masculinity look like now?"

COWEN: We have a big culture. Not everyone goes to university, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been to the Ivy Leagues.

PAGLIA: Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. That’s what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. We’re all genderless mannequins. The movie The Time Machine is like one. We’re moving toward that, the Eloi. That’s how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They’re the Eloi. They’re completely bland. They have no ideas. They all get along very well with each other because they’re nothing. They’re eating their fruits which are given to them by the Morlocks, or the industrial class. That’s how I see the future — unfortunately. I began my career talking about androgyny and talking about the imaginative complexity of androgyny and how the artist and the shaman and the prophet have this androgynous component. But today’s androgyny, it’s just boring....

Here's the precise clip (from the middle of an hour-and-a-half conversation):



I encountered the conversation because a few days ago, a commenter, Kit Carson pointed it it out because of something she said something about travel that seemed, to him, "althouse-like": "I’m like Huysmans’s aesthete, des Esseintes. I am not a great fan of traveling. I just feel like it’s become too onerous. No, I’m a mind traveler."

Here's the Huysmans text — "Against the Grain" — in full. Relevant excerpt:

The pleasure of travel, which only exists as a matter of fact in retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it is being experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without the necessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin....

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things....  One could revel... in long explorations while near one's own fireside, stimulating the restive or sluggish mind, if need be, by reading some suggestive narrative of travel in distant lands.....

The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself.

Artifice, besides, seemed to Des Esseintes the final distinctive mark of man's genius. Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness of her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate patience of æsthetes. Really, what dullness! the dullness of the specialist confined to his narrow work. What manners! the manners of the tradesman offering one particular ware to the exclusion of all others. What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal agency of mountains and seas!

Kit Carson may have thought Paglia sounded like me, but Paglia proclaimed that she was like Des Esseintes. Reading the text, I wonder if Paglia really intended to seem to be finding nature dull and boring and best replaced by artifice and imagination. Paglia tends to recommend that brainy folk get out of their cloisters and into the real world, and I don't think she looks down her nose at "the vulgar realities of things."

In fact, the part of the conversation that interested me most, about the draining of masculinity from the loftier realms of American culture, bemoans the lack of experience living in the world, living — as she put it — in the body. That's why she talked about the Eloi. Here's the scene with the fruit-eating:



"I'm going back to my own time. I won't even bother to tell of the useless struggle, the hopeless future. But at least I can die among men!"

What Paglia said that interested me most was that "masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak." That's a variation on something I've been thinking lately. In my way of looking at it, "allows" is the wrong word. I think we need to consider whether masculinity is constantly being eroded because it serves the purpose of making women weak.

All those commenters who wanted me to read "The Fountainhead."

All I did was buy the ebook "Atlas Shrugged" so I could blog about things Ted Cruz — "Political anarchist or genius?" — said in his (not a) filibuster yesterday. Having riffed on and sniffed at some bloody metaphors in the Ayn Rand tome, I was beset with comments telling me the Ayn Rand book I really must read is "The Fountainhead."

Surfed started it:

The Fountainhead was a better read, a more cogent and focused book and you get the same dose of the philosophy....

Addendum: In the movie Dirty Dancing (1987) Baby confronts Robbie to pay for Penny's abortion. Robbie refuses to take responsibility and preaches “Some people count and some people don’t” and then hands Baby a used paperback copy of The Fountainhead saying, “Read it. I think it's a book you'll enjoy, but make sure you return it; I have notes in the margin."

"Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy."

From a list of 35 aphorisms about lying.

But none of the aphorisms on the list is the aphorism I am looking for. You know the feeling that there is an aphorism that's already out there for something you're trying to say in aphorism form. You can say it briefly, but not in the words that must be in the aphorism.

Here's as close as I can get to saying what seems to me to be a rough paraphrase for a reasonably well-known aphorism: He who lies about small things will lie about big things. Or: Little lies foretell big lies.

What I'm looking for is the "Where there's smoke, there's fire" of lying.