US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man by Charlie LeDuff

Abstract

US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind American Man Charlie LeDuff. Penguin Press, New York, 2006 I first saw Charlie LeDuff on his ten-part television program, Only in America. It was an interesting, if uncomfortable, look how average US man struggles to achieve some semblance meaning in a confused and changing world. I next saw LeDuff on The Colbert Report when he was pitching book, US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind American Man, which is based on exploits that were subject his television show. The book could have an essentialist and nostalgic look an idealized US masculinity immersed in crisis, one that whitewashes experiences people color, gay men, poor, and generally marginalized. I was pleasantly surprised to find that LeDuff makes no attempt to offer up such a vision. Indeed, after providing a list masculine stereotypes, LeDuff states, of course, no such man has ever existed and no man probably ever will (x). LeDuff also rejects contemporary specter crisis, instead arguing that crises have existed across space and time: They say American man is falling to pieces; that he is spooked, spiritually deadened, dissociated, infantilized. That's just television talking. There's nothing wrong with us guys, except everything. But that's way it's always been (xii). Rather than reaching back to some romanticized past, LeDuff's book is located squarely in murky, discomfiting reality twenty-first century life. The picture that he paints is not a pretty one and language that he uses to describe it is frequently stark and occasionally coarse. He takes us across in search the angry, forgotten middling from where I come (xi). In so doing, he evokes an image that is in strong need repair. Drawing on assertion John Edwards that are two Americas, haves and have-nots, LeDuff argues that there is least a third America, have somewhats, and a fourth, self-defeated, people who fell off table and are never getting up to supper plate (3). One sees shards these people when he visits a circus, motorcycle fight club, gay rodeo, semi-professional football league, religious revival, war re-enactment, Burning Man Festival, and other sundry locations and events. There are no answers here, only questions, deep and troubling questions: book is not a sociological study. It offers no solutions to problems crime, immigration, economy, spiritual bankruptcy or other maladies afflicting male citizen United States America (x-xi). Yet many problems LeDuff outlines do not affect just males and perhaps that is why his comments on masculinity sometimes slip to background. These are American problems and in reviewing LeDuff's observations it becomes clear that is suffering from a crisis in leadership and a lack focus on how to solve macro-level issues stemming from globalization, race relations, and poverty as well as micro-level problems like spiritual confusion, and ennui life. LeDuff's visit to homicide division Detroit Police Department is particularly striking as he focuses on death in a dying city (156). He begins chapter by recounting a conversation detectives have about beheading an Arab-American woman, killed her husband's hands because an alleged affair. LeDuff points out that detectives seemed more interested in her breasts, which every guy in precinct stopped by to look at (150), than her murder. LeDuff is tongue in check as he points out audacity situation: Tits. You can't help but stare them, whether they're attached to a headless corpse or they appear in your run-of-the-mill crime scene (150). This same perverse callousness seems to appear in an inappropriate crime scene photograph a murder victim, a prostitute, who perished hands a serial killer (151). …