ABSTRACT
THERE ARE FEW THINGS IN THIS WORLD I CAN CONCEIVE AS BEING MORE INSTANTLY ludicrous than a prosperously middle-aged lump of pudgy Euroamerican versemonger, an apparition looking uncannily like some weird cross between the Malt-OMilk Marshmallow Man and Pillsbury’s Doughboy, suited up in a grotesque mismatch combining pleated Scottish tweeds with a striped Brooks Brothers shirt and Southwest Indian print vest, peering myopically along his nose through coke-bottle steel-rim specs while holding forth in stilted and somewhat nasal tonalities on the essential virtues of virility, of masculinity, of being or becoming a “warrior.” The intrinsic absurdity of such a scene is, moreover, compounded by a factor of five when it is witnessed by an audienceall male, virtually all white, and on the whole obviously well accustomed to enjoying a certain pleasant standard of material comfort-which sits as if spellbound, rapt in its attention to every nuance of the speaker, altogether fawning in its collective nods and murmurs of devout agreement with each detail of his discourse.
