Holy maraschino-cherry macho mishagas, Batman, what's with these push-up 'pulican's?

By Hal Brown

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By chance one of the first articles I read this morning had nothing to do with politics but for me it segued into the second one I read and led me to write this blog. The first article was in The Washington Post (subscription)

Weight training can be easy and still build strength. Here’s how.

It served as some motivation to start doing the light weight training lazy-me got out of the habit of doing an embarrassing length of time ago. My dumbbells don't do me any good languishing on the floor of my kitchen pantry (top photo).

The next article, by Amanda Marcotte, which I looked was... 

 

RFK Jr.'s MAGA workouts won't work: It takes more than push-ups to topple Trump

RFK Jr. and other GOP stooges think their fitness videos are impressive, but it's really quite sad

 It at was featured on the top of the page on Salon:

I watched the videos in the the article.

For some convoluted reason in my mind I thought of one of Robin's oft used taglines in the Batman series/

  Robin had many "holy something Batman" phrases. 

Here's a video of 50 other them.

 Seeing these videos he might exclaim Holy maraschino-cherry macho michagas Batman. This was my intial reaction.

Why did this come to me? 

Letting my mind wander, I recalled the time years ago when my friend Helen, her foster daughter, and I used to go to our local Friendly's restaurant and always made sure our favorite waitress waited on us. One time I ordered a sundae with extra cherries for desert and she brought me a sundae topped with as many cherries as would fit on the ample mountain of whipped cream. I think I made this association because the videos in the articles represented the sicky sweet cherries on the top of the sundae.

I have a photo of the actual sundae somewhere. This isn't it but it was taken of me at the same restaurant.

I'd read that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were going back and forth bloviating about having an actual cage fight, battling it out mano-a-manopossibly in Las Vegas.

You may prefer to forget the 2007 fake wrerstling match, Batttle of the Billionaires, between Trump and Vince McMahon with Trump "winning" and getting to shave McMahon's head.

. I'd seen the "this is my Covid protection" video of Margorie Taylor Greene lifting weights and doing swinging pull-ups...

...  and of course most of the Trump photoshopped digital trading cards depicting him as some musclebound superhero.

I hadn't seen RFK Jr. doing push-ups ("getting in shape for my debates with President Biden" which hopefully will never happen) showing off his actual muscled pects and abs. If anything demonstates the egotism and unseriousness of his run for president this one video tweet does.  

I hadn't seen Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley trying to show off by doing butt-in-the-air push-ups to prove, hmmm, something half-assed point:

Drew Comments, above left, snarkily wrote:

 For some guys who try to act so macho and manly these some sorry ass push-ups no cap Chuck Grassley and Tom Cotton I see why y’all fight for the 2nd amendment so hard. Y’all NEED guns

I have nothing to add to what Amanda Marcotte wrote in her concluding three paragraphs:

Such nonsense also lays the groundwork for other fascist arguments about who does and doesn't count because of their bodies. Women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and disabled people are often targeted with stereotypes of bodily degeneracy, as a pretext for stripping them of basic human rights. There's a reason that Trump and his acolytes like to portray immigrants as diseased or drugged-out, implicitly comparing them to supposedly pure-and-strong white Americans. Dehumanizing people as weak or sickly is a first step towards arguing they must be culled or controlled. There's a reason that the discredited theory of eugenics laid the foundation for the Holocaust.

Toxic masculinity and fitness fetishization also do lesser but real harm to the authoritarian personalities that get caught up in it. Right-wing websites and influencers like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan are always grifting their audiences by pitching useless supplements with false hopes of physical perfectability. People who believe Kennedy's silly claim about 35-minute workouts might get frustrated when it doesn't work out for them and develop eating disorders or other bad health habits response. And, of course, there's all the people who believed that only "weak" people need vaccines, and ended up either very sick or dying from COVID-19.

Working out is a good thing to do and being fit is a fine goal to have. It just turns to poison in the hands of fascists, who conflate fitness with moral superiority. Your push-up count says nothing about your character or fitness to lead. But your choice to post cringey workout videos as campaign proves that you're bankrupt in both departments.