His 'real man' is one who bullies
Star Tribune, June 16, 1999
By Katherine Kersten

Jesse Ventura's new book pulses with tales of prostitution, drugs, and all-around bullying. Initially, this created a flap, but Ventura sidetracked it by proclaiming his honesty. "I'm honest," he snorted; "I don't apologize for who I am." Apparently, that satisfied most of us.

Honesty. Jesse tells us over and over that's what got him elected. But the reader of Ventura's book, "I Ain't Got Time to Bleed," is struck with one thing, and it's not the man's honesty. This, after all, is the candidate who promised for months to cut back social programs, and then gave us the highest spending on government-subsidized child care in Minnesota history. No, what strikes the reader about this book is that its author is obsessed -- and has been all his life -- with proving that he's a man.

What's Ventura's idea of a man? As a youth, it meant bullying schoolmates, bragging about sexual conquests, and chucking a ladder through a school window. As a young man, it meant diving with the SEALs, riding with a motorcycle gang, and flexing his muscles as a pro wrestler. Today, it means declaring "Rolling Stones Day," carousing on "fishing" trips, and boasting of a hangover at his inauguration.

In Ventura's world, a real man is one who bullies and dominates others, while living for dramatic self-assertion. Sometimes, this takes the form of swashbuckling physical action, like leaping from helicopter "hell-holes." Always, it means striking the pose of the swaggering rebel, for whom "authority" is a four-letter word: "I speak my mind; ain't no one here big enough to tell me what to do."

This is manhood as the will to power. It is virile bluster with no guiding morality -- my ego, right or wrong. It's a 15-year-old boy's vision of manhood, and in his book, Ventura boasts forthrightly that he's never grown up.

It seems that we Minnesotans -- and apparently Americans everywhere -- can't get enough of Ventura. What's going on?

In his book, "Political Pilgrims," political scientist Paul Hollander sheds light on this question. Hollander notes the growing absence of heroes from our common life. But he points out that the retreat from the heroic does not mean that the thirst for it has also disappeared. Today, he says, "we find our heroes in most unlikely places: entertainers, athletes, gangsters." Why? Because, with the decline of moral certitude, we have few guidelines as to what human accomplishments and attributes are worthy of attention and admiration. As a result, says Hollander, "the 'hero' of our era has often been a transient celebrity catering more to desire for novelty, excitement and vicarious gratification than to moral impulses and inspiration."

Today, we are easily entranced by celebrities who trade on images of assertive virility. In our highly interdependent, urban society, we no longer have obvious ways to prove that we're men ourselves. A storm knocks out the power, and we're suddenly helpless. At the office, we push paper, and at night we settle in in front of the TV to watch real men battle it out on the football field or the streets of New York. Physically, we're far removed from the active life, with its risks and challenges; morally, we're adrift in shades of gray. We are, as the poet T.S. Eliot proclaimed, the hollow men.

Back in the 60's and 70's, those of us with intellectual pretensions assuaged our need for hero worship by idolizing strong, primitive, commanding male figures, preferably with unruly black beards. We were fascinated by men who seemed untroubled by the self-doubt that often nagged us, and who appeared unafraid to use violence to gain what they proclaimed to be noble ends. We hung our college dorm rooms with posters of glowering guerrilla leader Che Guevara, menacing in camouflage jacket, beret and bandolier. We idolized Black Panther leaders like Huey Newton, resplendent in shades, leather coats and tight black turtlenecks. The message of them all was the same: "For real men, it's 'By any means necessary.'"

Jesse Ventura is the tamer, nineties version of the "radical chic" of the 60's and 70's. But Ventura goes these now-antiquated figures one better, for he knows a dirty little secret. Ventura has stripped away the veneer of "social consciousness" that gave us an excuse to worship these self-dramatizing thugs: the literacy campaigns in Cuba, the children's breakfast programs in Oakland. Jesse knows that, at bottom, it's really about the bandolier, the leather jacket, and the swagger.

Ventura flatters Minnesotans by assuring us that we've become apathetic about politics because all politicians -- except him -- are boring. It's true, of course, that government has grown far too large, cumbersome and bureaucratic. Fundamentally, however, we've dropped out of politics because we're lazy and self-absorbed, preferring TV news soundbites to thoughtful policy analysis.

Unfortunately, our distaste for "boring" (adult) discussions of political ideas means we can't see the inconsistencies that will inevitably prevent Jesse Ventura from becoming an effective leader. Ventura grounds his "revolution from the ground up" on a call for a new politics of personal responsibility. But his exhortations to the rest of us -- make good decisions, don't have a baby if you can't support it -- ring hollow. As his new book makes clear, Ventura's own identity is inextricably bound up in a wholly opposite way of being. For him, life -- and manhood -- is about impulse, sensation, and self-congratulatory chest-thumping.

Minnesota's 1998 gubernatorial election wasn't really about honesty, as Ventura never tires of telling us. Fundamentally, it was about whose vision of manhood we found more attractive -- that of the two soft-spoken guys in suits, or that of the loud-mouthed "outlaw" in the fringe jacket. We didn't really vote for Jesse the Body. We certainly didn't vote for Jesse the Mind. We voted for Jesse the Big Man -- and it's tempting to say that, in the author of "I Ain't Got Time to Bleed," we got what we deserved.

-- Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.