Matchbook Man - the demise of the masculine image that use to grace the ads on matchbook covers promoting self-improvement studies, vocational training or high school completion courses - Column

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Florence King

To liberals he's the "blue-collar, white-male, racist, sexist homophobe." To feminists he's the "unsocialized" male because he continues to elude their gelding shears. I call him the Matchbook Man because he was the target of self-improvement ads in the matchbooks of my childhood.

Having had a mother who smoked four packs a day, I saw a lot of matchbooks and practiced my reading with them. On the inside of the cover were tiny grey coupons and ads that said: "Finish High School at Home in Your Spare Time!" or "Learn Locksmithing" or "Study Radio Repair" or "Be a Private Detective" - always at home in your spare time.

Some of the same ads can still be found in gun magazines or on late-night TV, but today's dwindling supply of matchbooks has been classed up. Now the inside is blank, while the cover contains embossed pictures of exclusive hotels and restaurants that the Matchbook Man never enters.

He frequents places like the pool hall where I have my midday beer after I finish my errands. I like it because there are no talkative waiters named Bruce, just chain-smoking waitresses. The clientele neither know nor care who I am, so no one says to me, "I've always wanted to write."

It was the day of the House budget vote and several young workingmen were watching the news. When the announcer said, "Congressman Timothy Penny has resigned," the T-shirted, tattooed viewers exchanged eager glances, their eyes lighting up with an energizing spark that seemed to bounce from face to face, linking them all in a circuitry of joy. There was something profoundly touching about it, and also something familiar. I had seen this raw masculine pride before.

It was during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Adlai Stevenson cornered the Soviet representative at the UN and demanded the truth, vowing, "I'll stand here till hell freezes over!"

The next day, some tree pruners were working outside my apartment building and I heard one of them say, "Boy, old Stevenson really told 'em, dint he?" His face was lit with the same glow that I saw on the faces of the boys in the pool hall. It's a look that never comes over a woman even though she may share the opinion that brings it on. Epiphanies composed of bellicose swagger and a purity that has nothing to do with sexuality are the exclusive property of the Matchbook Man.

It's just about all he has left. He used to be "the man who found a home in the Army," but now he must look hard to find the Army amid the welter of homemaking missions on which it has embarked. Craving an aura of Spartan hardness in which to prove himself, he gets instead Operation Restore Hope, made glorious by "the interaction we're accustomed to seeing between American troops and people we help," said Dick Cheney; or Operation Provide Comfort on the Iraqi border - where, wrote Mary McGrory, "Americans thrilled to the sight of U.S. soldiers changing babies."

While liberals form task force after task force to cure alienation in their beloved urban underclass, the Matchbook Man is being driven crazy by the growing primacy of warm feeling over cold justice in American life. His own moral center has the bleak, unequivocal beauty of a January dawn, but let him display it and it will be dismissed as an "inappropriate response."

When he watches news reports about "Iron John" manhood-weekend outings, he sees the same whey-faced academics who condemn him during the week, who know nothing about a carburetor except how to spell it. When he changes channels he will very likely find Weekend Man's feminist wife holding forth in a panel discussion about "the myth of masculinity." And should he leaf through a magazine he will find one of those nasty little editorial asides that politically correct journalists take pains to insert in their copy - e.g., Time's Richard Corliss's gratuitous description of Mike Tyson as "an exemplar of all those sad studs who are prisoners of manhood."

When he objects to Betty Boop congresspersons like Pat Schroeder and an attorney general with the mean mouth of a social worker on the rampage, it merely proves that "he just doesn't get it." What he does get all too well are our new definitions: an honorable man is one who doesn't cave until the last minute, and a maverick is one who teases like a belle to get primetime coverage. Every time it happens the Matchbook Man dies a little, but no, he's not alienated.

To him, every week is the Week That Was. He recoiled when California Highway patrolperson Melanie Singer burst into tears on the witness stand and wrecked the defense in the second LAPD trial. Now he has a brand-new crazymaker: the majestically ditzy Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a dead ringer for Zasu Pitts, who changed her mind at the last minute and put the Clinton budget over the top, then spent the following day on the tube wondering whether she had "fallen on her sword." Another noble Roman concept bites the dust.

Feminists will find my response to the Matchbook Man inappropriate, but I'm sure Mae West would back me up: I like a man who just doesn't get it.