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Volume CCXXXVI, Number 119  March 22, 2006 

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Not since a drunken vice president ventilated his hunting partner and then proceeded to booze it up further while his target languished on the operating table have we been pitched a softball like this one.

Little Harvey Mansfield, who looks like a manly man only when you line him up next to Richard Simmons, has offered up his latest apologia for reactionary politics and endless war. According to Harv, Western civilization was built by manly men and these days, what with coeducation, wimpy social policies like Social Security and pesky gals hounding Larry Summers out of office, our society's level of manliness is drooping, with potentially catastrophic consequences for privileged white male Protestant tenured Harvard Professors. Something about a parking space?

You don't need a Harvard Ph. D. to figure out how this jeremiad is constructed. Start with a few lazy generalizations about gender supposedly based on research, the value and applicability of which Mansfield is eminently unqualified to judge. Add a dollop of erudition from Aristotle and Machiavelli as to the value of virtu. Then draw a straight line from those worthies to the present day, where a manly President is being attacked by women and limpd***ks who don't understand the civilizing value of gratuitous war and tax cuts for rich white men.

Indeed, we too are having a hard time envisioning Western Civilization absent manly men like Stalin, Hitler, Tamurlane and Vlad the Impaler. Who knows what the world might look like in the hands of hormonally-challenged women? Manly professors might have to spend more time teaching undergraduates and less time pumping out reactionary drivel.

Perish the thought.

We welcome back to the ranks of the unreadable long-suffering self-proclaimed beauty Naomi Wolf. In past years, Naomi has mined her not-very-interesting past for publishable clichés on undoubtedly fascinating topics such as her beauty, her long-concealed status as a possible victim of sexual harassment at Yale, her slutty past and the very remarkable fact that she has given birth. What's left? It's a little soon for hot flashes. Divorce? Getting the little rugrat into Yale? Post-nasal drip?

Fear not, Wolf fans. When all else fails and you've spent the advance, why not turn to every woman's second-favorite topic: My Daddy?  It doesn't matter if daddy is as manly as Al Capone (see above) or as dorky as the current figurehead President of the United States, you can bet that his daughter will present him to the world as a combination of Heath Ledger and Buddha.

Now we don't know anything about Naomi's daddy and we don't see any reason to remedy that ignorance. From the jacket photo he shares with Our Authoress he looks like a vaguely hippie-dippie New Agey bulls*****r and c***hound. But what the hell, it's California.

We don't know if daddy was a good provider when little Naomi was skanking around San Francisco or wherever she grew up, but the old codger might generate some royalties for the overripe Naomi of today.

And you can't ask any more from a dad than that.

American celebrity humbug preachers fall into two categories: hate-filled reactionary crackpots like Pat Robertson and content-free self-help charlatans like the Rev. Osteen.

He presides over a mall-like "church" in that bastion of righteousness, Houston, Texas, preaching a go-getting gospel heavy on self-improving platitudes and light on what most of us would think of religion: a spiritual and ethical code that imposes duties on the individual in the service of a calling higher than the Almighty Dollar.

The Rev. Joel, in contrast to those dreary old drags like St. Augustine and John Calvin, claims that God wants you to park your shiny new Hummer in the three-car garage of your 4,000 square foot tract house. How he knows this is not clear. Maybe he met the Lord of Hosts for drinks at the Petroleum Club.

One thing about this peculiarly-American variant of the old time religion: it's quite popular, as indeed would be any faith that placed no burdens on the faithful other than grabbing for all the material gusto they could.

The only drawback to it? None, except you have to ignore that guy in the long hair and robe over there behind the money-changers. Even though he's weeping.