In a Wikipedia entry on Physical strength, one learns that “[w]hite meat is fast-twitch fiber, while red meat is slow-twitch fiber.” So what’s the difference physically?
Red meat from an animal would indicate that it came from body component that is expected to operate for extended periods of time, such as the legs. While white meat conversely comes from body parts that operate for extremely short periods, such as the muscles involved in chicken flight, an activity which doesn’t last long.
That’s really interesting to me, because I’ve been thinking lately about strength, and muscles, and meat, and politics.
I’ve had in mind a sort of manifesto about these topics, especially as they relate to Left Politics. There are a whole bunch of metaphors I want to try to draw together into sort of a formulation about what I feel are the shortcomings of the Left in recent American politics.
I’d call it something like Eat Red Meat For Strength: The Sissified Wussitude of The Vegetarian Left.
What I have in mind is that there are a whole host of problems or liabilities inherent in recent Left-wing political ambition, which have a causal relationship to the Left’s inability to triumph politically. What’s missing from the left is simply the notion that triumph is even something a politics should attempt.
Instead, American leftists seem preoccupied with gentleness, and sympathy toward the weak. We have very little hard strength of leadership; we placate; we embrace the soft; we replace red meat in our diets with vegetable protein; we’re shy of drawing blood or harming our adversary. Remember: “chicken fight” vs. “expected to operate for extended periods of time.”
If you are at all literary — which of course as a liberal, you’re almost required to be — you’re no doubt familiar with the notion of The Left being identified with weakness, oppression, and the sinister. Whereas The Right is linguistically identified with “correctness … authority and justice.[1]
And indeed, our American Leftism tends to embrace weakness and oppression.
I just think this should change around a bit.
I have friends who laugh at fitness and strength, who seem to despise confrontation and competitiveness. In conversation I’ve gotten the feeling that being a manly man in a relationship with a girly woman, allowing what seem to be natural masculine and feminine tendencies to develop and define our roles, is tantamount to a kind of Liberalist heresy.
I guess, if I were a proper Leftist, I should be more inclined to let the woman drive and own the car, bring home the (tofu)bacon, and wear the pants. A proper leftist guy would be slightly harder to distinguish from his burly life-partner womon.
I don’t mean to completely robe myself in good old-fashioned male chauvinism here, but it just seems to me that what’s missing from the motivations of the American Left is some genuine red-blooded, Teddy Roosevelt style, saber rattling, Progressive masculinity in the political realm. [Aside: I really lust loved typing all those <strong> tags in that last paragraph.]
What I think we need to do is set aside the soft-spoken gentlemanly ways of the peanut farmer, and instead polish off the elephant gun and go hunt us down some red meat.
