"What is the measure of a man," Steven Seagal asks in one of his movies. Or maybe he asks it in all of them—that urgent query does seem to underlie most pool-cue beatings, throat chops and righteous bad-guy gun-downs. (In his case, the answer appears to be, A man is measured by how much the script lets him jujitsu your ass!)
Still, despite having been posed by Steven Seagal, it's a good, important question. You see it being asked all over—of Kobe Bryant, for example, both in a Colorado courtroom and in the Laker's front office, where's he's practicing a little jujitsu of his own. Many in the world are applying the question to President Bush, seeing his war as simply a game of whose-is-bigger against a tinpot dictator, the UN, domestic critics and his dad. Or what about Steve Wynn—do you measure his manliness by the brawny megaresorts built, the charities supported or by the fact that I'm already braced to be yelled at simply for mentioning his name in this context?
It's a question Associate Editor Stacy J. Willis poses about midway through her fine, literate profile of Sheriff Bill Young (page 25). In fact, almost as much as it's a fine, literate profile of Bill Young, Stacy's piece is also a meditation on the changing meaning of manliness in Las Vegas as the old city ever more gives way to the new. It's a pressing issue for the man in charge of enforcing the law here.
Soon enough, the nation's voters will have to measure the men who would be king. It's old news to say pop culture has turned our politics into a monster-truck rally of entertainment-driven "messages," shaded truths, facts spun into cotton candy ... the assumption being that we're no longer a body of engaged voters but an audience with attention-deficit disorder. As if the minute we look away, we might vote for the other guy. Here we are now, entertain us!
What's new, argues Contributing Editor Steve Bornfeld on page 18, is that films are playing an unprecedented role. From Fahrenheit 9/11 to The Passion of the Christ, the big screen is putting big issues on the national table.
I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, so when I measure the man who's now president, a different, older movie comes to mind: the Hunter Thompson biopic Where the Buffalo Roam, a terrible film with one great scene. Thompson, alone in a men's room with President Nixon, launches into an escalating series of questions about the disenfranchised in Nixon's America: "What about the weak, sir, the silly, the dispossessed, the Italians, and sir, what about the doomed?"
Nixon's response: "F--k the doomed."
And that, as Thompson might say, pretty much lays the fish on the plate, then and now. When I look at George Bush's America—a land of Halliburton juice jobs and the Patriot Act, of Ken Lay and the jihad against gay marriage—I finally see a man whose vision of this country is small and exclusive, reserved for those entitled to enter by virtue of breeding, faith or political affiliation, and for those who can afford admission. The rest of us might as well be the doomed, and, as the vice president's recent domestic-policy initiative reminds us, we can go fuck ourselves.