Balls to the Wall, Part 2: Man Up

Out here in hick country, it was several years ago when I first found myself stuck behind some jacked-up four-by with a weird sticker plastered across the rear window -- a silhouette of a cowboy, from behind, encircled with two iterations of a cryptic redneck magick spell: Cowboy Up.

That first encounter, I instinctively wondered aloud, given my prejudice against such folk, cowboy up what? Up your ass? That would jibe pretty closely with what I've always presumed is the deeply closeted nature of many hicks, the corroboration of which is the inevitable overcompensation such vehicles connote -- virtually everyone driving these wank-jobs is some 5'6" banty rooster who has to wear a giant hat to get close to the 6' range, which as we all know is where the real eagles fly.

It took a few sightings of this adhesive secret handshake to realize that my linguistically wonkish nature had neglected to allow for the possibility that "cowboy" was being used as a verb. Of course! And why not? It fits with the intrinsic notion that rednecks just know that they're working (and playing) harder than everyone else. Just ask them, they'll tell you. So naturally cowboying up imputes a higher sense of being, sorta like Tool's Forty Six & 2 minus the Jungian/Melchizedekian imagery (and drum solo). Push on, strive to be all the cowboy one can be. Larger tyres await thee in Valhalla, mighty keg-hauler!

Okay, enough picking on the rednecks. This campaign year has been the Year of the Ballbusting Shrew. Lowing cows from hither and yon, who in past years would have had to debase themselves to get a school board position, have found themselves Palinized, thrust front-and-center to compete for national positions that they are manifestly unqualified for.

Knowing this, and competing against tenured, diffident men who can't have sex anymore without a ball gag and a safe word, the default phrase for these gibbering dingbats is to emasculate the already emasculated DC lifer with the clichéd-before-it-was-first-uttered "Man up!". This is done knowing full well that these men, even if they possessed a pair, are culturally discouraged from responding in kind, as if pimp-slapping a nasty troll like Sharron Angle had fuck-all to do with picking on a girl.

Needless to say, it's always frustrating to see essentially meaningless catch-phrases become oft-repeated standbys of talentless hacks seeking higher office. It's this year's "Where's the beef?".