MAINLY WHITE MEN SUFFERING LATE LIFE PENIS PROBLEMS

Harel Shapira, Waiting for Jose: The Minutemen's Pursuit of America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (The author's analysis, though balanced, is not very nuanced. And, the Minutemen, though moaning about America's loss of greatness, never really provide a clear vision of what specifically made America "great" back whenever. In that way, they are very much like Donald Trump: we know he/they don't think America is great right now; he/they want to bring America back to greatness; and that enemies (both external and internal) are undermining America's greatness. But he/they cannot articulate what his/their great America would actually look. I suspect it is a stylized version of the 1950s. That is, America before the civil rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education; before the more liberal immigration policy when immigration was pretty much limited to western European; when women (or at least middle class white women) stayed home; when mom would admonish you to finish all your food on your plate and to think of all the starving children in China; when a man would get a job at the factory, stay there for forty years, then retire with a company pension; when Europe was in shambles due to WWII, the United States was the only working economy, and having the $$ enabled America to call the shots internationally; etc. That America was not everybody's America, and it certainly was not great for everybody. Like the American West in the American mind, it is a myth. And myths are stories, lies really, we tell ourselves to deal with our fears. Building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, describing Mexican immigrants as 'aliens.' 'rapists,' 'drug dealers,' 'terrorists,' etc., is not going to make America great.).