I used to joke that, next time around, the terrorists merely had to fly crop dusters over America and drop a million tons of peanuts on our heads and watch the “allergies” kick in.
Until I realized you’d all be wearing helmets, so the peanuts would just bounce off.
Today it is my sad duty to report that the transformation of the ideal Western “male” from alpha to beta is likely irreversible:
“I recently undertook a small survey of some more mature male friends, and the results, while not unanimous, were overwhelming. To speak plainly, given the choice, eight of the ten men surveyed preferred…”
***
Gag me.
So our descendants, writing about their own 9/11, will praise not “the men who ran into the buildings when others were rushing out” but “the men who crawled under their desks and actually kinda liked how cozy and warm the office had gotten all of a sudden.”
Our only hope is that the average Esquire writer’s, er, taste in male acquaintances is unrepresentative of the general population.
(Except that his reports on what goes on in Jonathan Franzen novels & art house hits and at Burning Man render that hope mostly false.)
Meanwhile, I’ve been forced to write a pastiche Larkin mock elegy.
This sucks.
Anus Impendeo
Fellatio began
In nineteen seventy-two
(which might have been early for you)
Between the birth of Updike’s Bech
And the movie Deep Throat‘s debut
