Hegseth, the Generals Conclave, and the Cult of the Male Body
Who flaunts their tats on their book cover? Just guess.
Dear Sages,
Thank you so much for your patience these last 10 days. Just the usual human stuff: got sick! I encourage you again to join E. Jean Carroll’s PAPER CLIP PROTEST. Ease on over to her place, and you’ll get the drift, or go to Joyce Vance’s brilliant “Civil Discourse” where she explains the power of this tiny symbol—a paper clip protest is what some European countries did to protest Nazi occupation. It can work here, too!
We’ll just come right out and say it: Hegseth’s forced gathering of every highest-ranking general and admiral on the planet—some 800 of them—could have resulted in a disaster of unimaginable proportions: they could all have been killed at Quantico, or we could have been attacked abroad or on the high seas while Hegseth and Trump pranced around in their latest attempt to squelch the mention of the term EPSTEIN.
Encouraging was the response of the nation’s most erudite, responsible and effective military leaders: stone-faced disdain.
Lecturing for almost three hours were two incomparably arrogant and asinine and narcissistic “leaders”—Pete Hegseth, preeminent drunk among the always power-drunk Fox News “commentators” (read: propagandists) and Donald Trump, our dementia-ridden, possibly illegally “elected” president (see the Rockland County New York lawsuit).
Trump’s rant was particularly dangerous (see next post, probably tomorrow).
Hegseth’s was a continuation of his “Crusades” rhetoric and his very vile—and extremely fascist—Hitlerian and Francoist glorification of the male body. It takes no imagination whatsoever to see this as a quintessential act of ADOLESCENT MALE NARCISSISM, one virtually without equal.
Unacceptable, says Hegseth, are dad bodS (beloved of children and moms everywhere), the granddad bod, the male body made fat by multiple woundings and the drugs necessary to heal them, the body ravaged by cancer from Agent Orange exposure. But exempt, of course, the fat, sick body of dementia-riddled Donald Trump—but not that of a 65-year-old general made fat by out-of-control cortisol from unimaginable stress. No, no. Hegseth wants them HARD. Did anybody else have trouble with this???????
No matter that Hegseth—like RFK, Jr, like Noem and Vance and Miller and Vought and Musk—shows signs of having mental health problems and has a history of serious, fall-down-drunk alcohol problems and sexual abuse, he holds himself up as a paragon and exemplar of the fascist’s obsession with themselves as the spittin’ image of Apollo.
Note: FASCISM IS ALWAYS A MALE-DOMINANT DELUSION AND IT IS ALWAYS CONNECTED TO A RELIGION THAT CAN GIVE IT FAKE LEGITIMACY.
SEE #5 and #8 HERE:
And next, we really have to thank Guillermo del Toro for the film The Devil’s Backbone, and, in the director’s commentary (on the Criterion CD) a commentary by Sebastiaan Faber on the Cult of the Male Body in Franco’s Spain. See this film. It will teach you soooooooo much!!!! And don’t skip the commentaries!!!
![The Devil's Backbone (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-4fm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F31c8c636-f64d-4c9c-92e5-2e5f6087d329_175x218.jpeg "The Devil's Backbone (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]")
Meanwhile, our sister site The Patriarchy and the Sacred Feminine laid out the cult of the male body in this article. This one shows where this is at and where it goes. The Nazi iconography alone is nauseating, especially in combination with the obviously woman-denigrating imagery created by the same artists.
More …
HEGSETH IS AMERICAN TALIBAN, the guy who wants a “360-degree Holy War” to exorcise “the leftist specter.” He’s Henry II and a drunken Leonid Brezhnev all rolled into one. And he’s your Secretary of Defense. You definitely want to read this one to understand what the Jerusalem Cross means in this time.
And …
Just to clarify, Pope Leo has NOTHING to do with this, lectured Vance on compassion (which he doesn’t have), just spoke out against the treatment of migrants in the United States, is hiring women faster than the U.S. government, thinks Dick Durban (despite his support of abortion) deserves the award the cardinal of Chicago is trying to give him, and is no supporter of right-wing fascism anywhere. The Jerusalem Cross above was a Crusader’s symbol in the 13th century and NOW IT MEANS WHITE SUPREMACY. This emblem is tattooed BIGLY on Hegseth’s right pectoral muscle.
OK, that’s it for this morning. More coming on the very ominous speech made by Trump, which tried to co-opt the loyalty of all these generals and admirals into using the military in a coup against the American people that would destroy the United States.
Love and Light … and please support us if you can.
As plain as daylight: white male supremacy.
Fascinating; horrifying too! If you are female!