T.G.I.H.A.F.
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December 27, 1994
Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer
This, say the pundits, is the Year of the White Male.
We just had the Year of the Woman, but apparently it didn't take. Now the most powerful person in America is a man named Newt Gingrich -- a name and a man that are everything you think of when you think of white males, particularly the angry kind that are causing such concern.
Who are these creatures with skin the color of hairy Silly Putty, with tendencies toward proclaiming medieval crusades, inventing calculus, founding no-load mutual funds and dancing like brain-damaged chickens?
Like Gypsies, they move among us unnoticed, but a separate society. Even though they commit most of the crimes in America and have a virtual lock on electric power generation, shipbuilding and most of North Dakota, not one American university has a department of white male studies.
No library has a "white males" section, which forces researchers to glean information from works such as "The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini" and Winston Churchill's "History of the English Speaking Peoples." No magazine exists to parallel Ebony or Woman's Day. It's hard even to imagine one -- maybe something like a cross between Popular Mechanics and Harp and Hound -- The Irish Wolfhound Fancier's Bimonthly.
Why haven't the supposedly vigilant media told us more about these people? Though percentages of white males are dwindling in the media (and other businesses), editors and producers could have found enough to infiltrate white-maledom. None of this happened overnight. Long before Speaker-to-be Gingrich was mailing around his motivational tapes, white males were extending their tentacles into every crevice of American life.
It was white-male theories and capital, applied at key moments, that lay behind the Industrial Revolution. Some African American scholars have shifted credit to the Jews in recent years, but the real force behind the transatlantic slave trade was not just Christians, but white male Christians by the thousands. The Boer War was fought largely by white males -- on both sides! AT&T, arguably the most powerful monopoly in the world, was brought to its knees by one white male, Judge Harold Greene. White males take understandable pride in their organizations: the New York Yacht Club, the Mafia, the Lions Club of Chillicothe, Ohio, and the Holy Roman Empire are only four of them.
No one has yet explained why white males show their feelings only in stylized rituals ranging from kicking down a girlfriend's door to writing "The Canterbury Tales" or the score of "Madame Butterfly." Though generally held to be less poetic and less sensitive to the nuances of feeling, many white males have made art that wins acclaim around the world. Among them are Marcel Proust, Michelangelo, Johannes Brahms and Sylvester Stallone. The King James Bible, a monument of both literature and religion, was translated into English by a small group of males, all of whom may have been white.
Famous phrases from white male history:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Veni, vidi, vici.
Summer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu!
Be sure the computer is switched off before attempting to replace the mother board.
What time is the game?
Some questions bedeviling the national psyche about white males:
Q: Does white male anger have anything to do with 25 years of being described in newspaper columns, television panel shows, demonstrations and living room arguments as rabid racists; as self-loathing gynephobic rape addicts; as phallocentric redneck gun nuts; as sadistic, misogynistic, chauvinistic despoilers of nature; as automatic teller machines at the sperm bank; as hegemonic, gin-and-tonic, in-need-of-high-colonic imperialist pigs; as patriarchal closet-queen mama's boys who never grew up; as unnecessary mutant ice-people devolutionary freaks who refuse to stop the car and ask for directions no matter how lost they get; as heartless, manipulative wife-beaters who deserve to be soaked in gasoline and set on fire?
A. Yes.
Q: Does white male anger have anything to do with Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her sleeping husband's penis, thereby becoming a feminist heroine and walking away from the courtroom a free woman?
A: Yes.
Q: Is Bill Clinton a white male just like the ones who voted Republican?
A. Technically, yes.
Q: Why can't white men jump?
A: Why should they?
Fun Facts to Know and Tell:
Dexter Pierce of Sunapee, N.H., who invented the clothespin in 1858, was a white male. Dennis Conner, a recent winner of the America's Cup yacht race, is both white and a male. Samuel Langley, believed by many to have demonstrated powered flight before the Wright Brothers, was a white male. While Hillary Rodham Clinton was designing the biggest and most complex health program in the history of the world, her husband, Bill Clinton, served as president of the United States.
Still, the media continue to vilify not just Bill Clinton but all white males. The vilification is not without justification. Virtually all of the Americans accused of wife-beating have been males, and most have been white. White males are responsible for fathering every illegitimate white baby in America. Gen. George Custer, a white male, lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn. An inexplicable refusal to get into lifeboats doomed hundreds of white males in the sinking of the white-male-designed Titanic.
White males are demanding, impetuous and apt to invade Russia with several hundred thousand soldiers on a moment's notice. One day they spend all morning hanging around the hardware store. The next, they're refuting Berkeley's proof of the existence of God. When they go upstairs you never know whether they're writing a computer program, inventing penicillin or throwing their underwear on the floor. Their motto seems to be: Might as well, can't dance.
But who else would invent miniature golf or make Oliver Stone's movies? Who else would go to the moon and not be able to figure out what to do when they got there? Who else would be Neil Diamond? Who else would get angry enough to vote in Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House?
