people are talking about Fox News's "reporting"/clear falsification of post-debate Kerry quotes - screed like

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

It's clearly fucked up that Fox is fabricating slander. But what i'm more perturbed by is that none of the people who are blasting this, including people whose opinions i respect and value enormously, are attempting to wrestle with what seems to be the most obvious element of Cameron's bizarre attempt at a fascist appropriation of The Onion (or something) is the stark homophobic logic which permeates/saturates the "jest." The not particularly tacit implication here is that while Bush is a proletarian he-man, a staid defender of revolutionary freedom and Western reason, (despite his Connecticut upbringing, incredibly wealth and powerful roots, and tenure at Groton, Yale, and Harvard,) Kerry is effete and effeminate, "metro" only because another prefix would be far too obvious a smear. Yet that to queer Kerry is to slander him is the real argument Cameron makes, the one he assumes is obvious enough not to even warrant consideration.



Bush isn't a cowboy, he's a preppie fratboy cheerleader turned yuppie fuck-up with a hard on for fascism and empire. Kerry isn't a metrosexual, he's a jackass. (And i've never found "the metrosexual" to be a particularly useful construction.) The ways in which Cameron constructs gender, sexuality, and their relationship to state power may not be novel, (though there's certainly an argument to be made about new imperial articulations of masculinity and heterosexuality in the age of San Francisco, New Paltz, and Samara,) but they warrant more than oblique references from folks struggling to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.



I'm moving to Boston tomorrow to start the new job after almost a week of grueling training. I'm stressed out and not totally sure if i can do this, so wish me luck.