THUS FAR THE DOMINANT IMAGE OF the US. presidential 'race' has been a pudgy Bill Clinton, in shorts and a t-shirt, waddling through each city he visits, jogging towards the White House. The message is, heck, if America is going to be revitalized, America will need a saxophone-playing womanizer who wears Reeboks. George Bush, by comparison, is an old fart who throws up on the Japanese prime minister. (A man who cannot control his bodily functions, after all, is not fit to be president.) So Bush and running-mate Dan Quayle are desperately re-asserting the President's masculinity by casting him as the military mastermind who pulverized Iraq. All of which begins to look fairly obvious after reading Joyce Nelsons 'Real Men on the Campaign Trail' in Sign Crimes/Road Kill (Between the Lines $16.95). In her newest collection of essays, Nelson asserts that in 1988, "Masculinity emerged as the real subtext of both the U.S. and Canadian federal elections.";In the final months of the campaign, the U.S. candidates tried to look like posers at Muscle Beach, sprinkling their rhetoric with repudiation of anything feminine." Brian Mulroney has adopted the U.S. Macho Mouth style, according to Nelson, asserting that opponents of Free Trade are "selling timidity and the concept of a little Canada." Nelson, who lives in Victoria, has been dubbed by a Books In Canada reviewer as 'the most astute cultural critic in Canada.' Not above referring to presidential hopefuls as venal pigs, Nelson is an ecofeminist who specializes in media and politics. Her earlier books are The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age (1987), The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (1988) and Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and Media (1989). 0-921284-54-3

[BCBW, Autumn, 1992]