The Misanthrope's Corner - presidential candidates as alpha males - Brief Article - Column

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by Florence King

UNINTENDED consequences strikes again. All politicians promise to "do something about education," but now, at long last, one of them has delivered. Thanks to Al Gore's masculine-image problems, Americans are learning the Greek alphabet.

These are dumbed-down times, so we haven't gotten beyond the first two letters, but that's enough to explain Al Gore. A leader must be a dominant, aggressive alpha male, but Gore is a submissive, fear-grinning beta male who never tries to mate because the females would just reject him and the alpha male would kill him.

Women have always instinctively understood this difference. Back when I was a sorority pledge memorizing the entire Greek alphabet, alpha males were called "real men" and beta males were called "drips," but these simple categories vanished in the Seventies when Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey took to the jungle and made faces for the documentary cameras. The contemporaneous emergence of the "gorilla ladies" and early feminism scienced up what women already knew and cast a pseudo-anthropological veneer over girl talk. Men became "males" and watching National Geographic specials replaced perusing old yearbooks.

Alphabetized men are once again in the news thanks to Naomi Wolf, the garrulous sibyl with the Charlie's Angels hair who is employed as Al Gore's valet. Whether or not she advised him to be Alpha Gore-she claims she did not-she has given Campaign 2000 a unique twist. Now the whole country is looking at the candidates and wondering, "Which one is the ape?"

When the American woman expresses a desire for alpha males, she means something all her own, an ersatz ideal extending beyond established systems of biology and ethics into a dense jungle of predatory fallacies and feral oxymorons that can change color to blend in with whatever they land on. As in any National Geographic special, first you see it, then you don't.

To survive in this gynecratic terra incognita, the American alpha male must understand that being too aggressive is "unacceptable." He can sow his seed as much as he likes as long as he pays child support. He should be a good father, but under no condition should he be a strict father, because patriarchal dominance must be stamped out. The Alphas have already caved on this point, judging from the raft of TV ads featuring men gazing in limpid adoration at children. The AFLAC Dad buys insurance "Because he has his mother's eyes," while the MasterCard Dad spends his vacation staring intently at his son and intoning, "Remembering who you work for is priceless."

This sounds like bad news for hot-tempered John McCain, but guess again. As McCain's former press secretary explained it, "He gets very angry when people attack his family, his wife." How angry? When the Arizona Republic ran a cartoon insulting to McCain's wife, he stopped speaking to them for a year. He got even madder over an article in the Phoenix New Times: "He didn't speak to me for five years," said the reporter. Andrew Jackson fought duels over insinuations about his wife, but he was "out of control." McCain drops pins so his enemies will know there's a lot more silence where that came from.

According to Elizabeth Drew, some Republicans are using "temper" as a code word to suggest that McCain is unstable. That "temper" has become synonymous with crazy proves that masculinity has been soccer-mommed to death, so McCain's place in the Greek alphabet is a moot point.

Then there's the scion of the Grecian alphabet. It's instructive to compare him to another George-Georges-Jacques Danton, the French Revolution leader and one of history's premier alpha males.

A son of the soil, the boy Danton was kicked in the face by a cow when he bent under her and squirted milk into his mouth from her udder. His nose was broken and his cheekbones crushed. A few years later, he was kicked in the face again, this time by a bull (today's image-makers would make much of the gender balance), and suffered a broken jaw. By now his broad peasant visage looked like a clenched fist, but it wasn't over yet. A bout with smallpox left him pitted.

He acted on women like catnip; they couldn't keep their hands off him. He bedded them all, but he also adored his wife and boasted that he made love to her every night. When she died suddenly while he was away from Paris, he rushed back as soon as he got word. Going directly to the cemetery, he dug up her grave, pried open her coffin, and, sobbing wildly, covered her corpse with kisses.

George W. missed a New Hampshire debate to watch his wife receive an award from Southern Methodist University. Our only conceivable answer to Danton is Steve Forbes, who has a pitted face.

The surest sign of an alpha male is that he is alpha even in extremis. The spectacle of a powerful man brought low has the somber magnificence of the death throes of a bull elephant, as we see in Nancy Hale's poem on the death of Darius the Great.

Then all the frightened generals ran away.

But first they slashed and jabbed at him with knives.