RUTHFULLY YOURS

The rain that devastated  Appalachia’s hollers was petering out by the time what was left of Hurricane Hellene barrelled up the Mississippi Valley’s eastern flank and ran out of puff for good in northern Ohio. But we still got five inches in half that many days — drizzle when it wasn’t pelting and a chill at dawn that recommended a jumper for the first time in what is a fast-faltering Indian summer.Another downpour was hammering the motel when the TV news cut to footage from New York of thousands filling Fifth Avenue, waving Hamas flags and mourning among so many other unholy recent martyrs the man who in 1983 sent a fellow death cultist to blow up 238 of their fellow Americans in their Beirut barracks. Decades later, back in 2001, thousands dusted white with shock and ash trudged north along the same Fifth Ave from the piles of the Twin Towers. But today, not even a full generation later, people who might quietly have cheered those earlier  massacres were openly and aggressively making common cause with the latest iterations of the original 9/11 monsters. You see and hear some odd and wonderful things in New York, but a 20-block ‘*f***  you’ never seemed likely, especially in this most Jewish of diaspora cities. Not until October 7, 2023, when anti-Semitism came out from under its rock.

Here in Toledo, though, all is quiet. Well almost quiet, the News from Detroit, two hours to the north over the nearby Michigan border, tells of anti-Semitic pamphlets turning up on scores of driveways in the comfortably middle-class suburb of Farmington, about 20 miles from Motor City’s gutted heart. But it wasn’t much more than a police blotter item as far as the papers’ news editor was concerned. Nothing much to dwell upon, not when the country’s best universities are seeing the same and worse displays of enthusiasm for rapists and butchers. So the pamphlets, which also turned up in their hundreds in two other nearby towns, weren’t man-bites-dog stuff, just business a bit more than usual in a state where pro-Hamas/Hezbollah barrackers were chanting  ‘Death to America’ in gorgeously multicultural Dearborn. Also  getting a run on that recent afternoon’s Koranic concert card, a reminder that Allah wants Jews to get what’s good for them wherever they be found. You can understand why the Detroit News back-benchers gave the story just eight column inches and buried it on page four. When something is commonplace, what’s the news in it?

As Kamala Harris and the census-crunchers running her ground game see it, being nice about Islam is a requisite courtesy on the path to Inauguration Day. It’s the reason she didn’t fill the veep berth with Josh Shapiro, the savvy Pennsylvania governor and gifted orator who might have done her a power of good in his own swing state and elsewhere too. But sorry, Josh, you’re a Jew and that won’t fly in Muslim-heavy Michigan. So she settled instead on Minnesota’s self-proclaimed “knucklehead”, Governor  Tim Walz. He’s a multiple fabulator caught cold almost daily in lies large and small, from his military record to claiming he was in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed.

Yet even a buffoon can have his uses if he comes with the endorsement of the local imams, of which his state has many ministering to its 68,000-odd recent Somali arrivals. That much-courted and newly naturalised constituency also has no love for Jews. So pick up our signals, you Muslim Michiganders, the Harris campaign has been intimating with smile and wink: sure, our girl has uttered the obligatory pledge of support for Israel but do please rest assured she’s never, ever been fan of the Zionist Entity.

The pandering, the silence about American hostages held and perhaps still alive in Gaza, the trusting reliance on Hamas’ claims of 40,000 civilian casualties, the refusal to respond when the Houthis launch missiles at US warships — can you imagine Ronald Reagan, even Bill Clinton, tolerating such a provocation? Well none of it has done a bit of good. The latest Michigan polls put Trump almost five per cent ahead, which is deeply ironic when you remember he was the architect of the Abraham Accords and has hailed the “genius” Israel’s exploding pagers. But with the election weeks away and votes already being cast, rationality doesn’t stand a chance. With the Harris campaign, perhaps it never has.

While courting the Jew haters of Michigan has borne no fruit, the millions of dollars spent on ads to bring working-class men back to the Democrat fold have done no better. Again, to the extent you can trust the pollsters, which recent elections say you can’t, with 21 days to go before Election Day men are even more averse to Harris than women are to Trump. Most unsettling, this drift to the GOP applies particularly to black men under 40, a demographic never thought likely, indeed capable, of wandering off the Democratic reservation. The Harris campaign’s efforts to stem the exodus have been not just comically inept but, tellingly, an ill-prescribed antidote that has made the symptoms of XY disenchantment considerably worse.

Picture if you will a brainstorming session for anxious Democrat stalwarts, all the party’s intersectional constituencies present and correct. You can populate the chairs about the table’s rim with a gay or two, at least one trans, plus professional feminists, academics and political operatives for whom Flyover Country begins just beyond the Beltway. What do men want, they ask each other?

Well, guns and hunting, obviously, football too, wearing plaid flannel shirts, and don’t overlook working on cars and turning burgers on barbecues.

Get the picture? They understand men not at all — real men, that is, not some sociology professor’s deconstruction of a notional masculism into its core parts. Thus have America’s airwaves come to display shallow, cliched ads and wince-worthy footage.

We’ve seen “Tampon Tim” leaning into the engine well of a pickup to deliver a lecture on the importance of clean air filters. That the one he installed as the cameras rolled was a brand-new pristine stage prop and in no need of replacing made a mockery of the vice-presidential aspirant’s automotive expertise, as millions of real men noticed.

Not to be deterred, this last week they sent Walz into the paddocks of Minnesota dressed in hunter’s orange regalia fresh from the store and toting a Beretta shotgun he claimed to have used to shoot “lots of skeet”. Trouble was, the camera caught him unable to figure out how to load the pump-action’s four cartridges. Once again, real hunters, male and female alike, rolled their eyes at the antics of a poseur who knows as little about bagging pheasants as he believes fervently in the need for tampon dispensers in schoolboys’ toilet blocks. If Elmer Fudd comes to mind, well that is only to be expected.

All of the above and much more beside, damaging as it has been to Harris’ hopes, pales in comparison with the Democrats’ latest push to reclaim men, an ad and social-media campaign titled ‘Man enough to vote for a woman’. They even dragged Barack Obama into the farce, featuring the normally astute former president lecturing young men about what he divined as their deep-rooted, perhaps subconscious reluctance to make their marks for Harris. Below is the official Harris ad with commentary from an eye-rolling representative of its target audience:

But it gets better – or rather worse. Every single female-friendly male stereotype is a paid actor, with the award for chutzpah going to the black guy who crows of being man enough to braid his daughter’s hair. Not only is he no father to girl, boy or anything in between, he has also achieved minor fame as a performer in gay erotica.

And there you have it: On the one hand, Harris panders to Muslims, many of whom would vote for her only if Mohammad rode down from Heaven on his flying horse and ordered them to do so (not likely before November 5), and on the other, men who bridle at being depicted as if they are simpletons in a case study by a blue-haired professor of women’s studies gibbering about masculinist toxidity.

Elect Harris and lock in four more years of all this? Increasingly, as the polls show, more voters are saying ‘You must be joking’. The problem is they aren’t.