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| Canada gosling (and parent), Riverside South; overdone lighting by Google+. |
In Not Cool, Gutfeld writes that “the haters of the old white male forget that it was a hardy group of old white men who created this country.”That's an interesting misapprehension. They were undeniably white and male, but they weren't especially old. In 1776, in fact, they were almost all quite a bit younger [jump]
than Gutfield himself, who's 49 according to Wikipedia: the author of the Declaration of Independence was 33, and his friend Mr. Madison 25; John Jay was 35, Alexander Hamilton was a kid of 19, and John Hancock (39), Paul Revere and John Adams (41), and George Washington (44) the still extremely vigorous authority figures. The only one among the central standout figures that you could call an old man was the 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin, and he was in some ways the friskiest (and of course the most big-government radical) of them all.
Gutfield isn't lying here, just making stupid assumptions and being too lazy to check them out, but you can see where the assumptions are coming from: in his mind the Founding Fathers are Fathers in the first place, the solemn and unforgiving dudes expecting him to do his duty, and all his life they've been just around thirty years older than he is, aging along with him at that distance, in their hose and breeches and powdered hair. He thinks they're conservative, even though he knows officially they were revolutionaries, but in the conservative mental confusion it must have been a conservative revolution, like Reagan's, meant to make the thirteen colonies more the way they were in the 1950s except for the tax part.
If he could hang out with them as they were in 1776, younger than him, better-looking and presumably sexually more potent, making him feel like an unlettered rube with their intricate, caffeinated babble, he'd hate those fucking hippies. Because, you see, he'd still be a conservative—they'd have nothing in common.
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| Photo via Fred Hystere. |
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