Genital Politics

“I guarantee you,” said Donald Trump, “there’s no problem”.

Donald was addressing an audience.  The television cameras were rolling.  Many of his supporters cheered.   Others seemed stunned into silence.  Had they heard him right?  What could he possibly have been talking about?   The prospects for the American economy?  The future of America’s relationship with Mexico and China?   The future of Guam?  The size of America’s armed forces?

None of the above, actually.  Mr. Trump was evidently referring to the size of his organ.  Earlier in the day, responding to personal attacks on him by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate at the last election, Mr. Trump said Romney had been ready to ‘go down on his knees for my support’.  But that’s a whole other topic.

Huh?

Yes, you read it right.  You may also have heard it right on American network television, live, the other night.  The big fella was referring in the first instance to his Big Fella.  The second was apparently an allusion to the use to which it might have been put.

The descent into Mr. Trump’s trousers started when he responded to remarks someone had made about his hands.  Or maybe it was Trump who’d made some comment about an opponent’s hands.  I don’t actually remember whose hands were at issue.  All I know is that the argument somehow succumbed to gravitational pull by travelling from hand to penis.

I grasp the significance of the size of a Republican candidate’s hands.  The bigger they are, the safer they are.  It’s certainly true in baseball, but even in the world of politics you often hear a reliable person referred to as a ‘safe pair of hands’.

I’m less clear about the perceived advantages of an oversized set of personal tackle.

If these exchanges sounded familiar, it may be because they bring back memories of the kind of dialogue we used to hear in the playground when we were at primary school, usually after a fight.

“Okay, who started it?” the teacher demands to know.

“He did,” someone says, pointing a finger.

“No, miss, it wasn’t me, it was him,” says the accused, pointing right back.

“And who, pray tell, has been using unsavoury language?”

“Not me, miss,” the miscreants sing out in unison.

Yes, the presidential election campaign has now descended to the same level of banter.  “Mine is bigger than yours, so there.”

Never mind the issues.  Let us not fear that the Middle East is in flaming turmoil; or that Islamic fundamentalists are trying to take over the entire region – North Africa, too, for that matter; or that North Korea may be close to setting off a nuclear weapon.  Worry not that Europe may be falling apart under the weight of immigrants; not to mention a dysfunctional currency; nor that Britain might want out.  Spare nary a moment’s thought for the slowdown in China’s economy or the fragile state of America’s.  War clouds gathering in the Far East?  Not much we can do about it, is there?

Mr. Trump’s United States, he says, would build a wall to keep the wetbacks out of America.  Europe laughs, but in eastern provinces fences are already going up to keep the refugees out.   The Euro may collapse, the United Kingdom may disintegrate; China and Japan may have it out over an uninhabited rock in the Pacific.  But let’s not concern ourselves with all that.  At least not until we’ve discovered, once and for all, and entered it into the Library of Congress, or the Smithsonian, or the baseball Hall of Fame, who owns the biggest Republican dick.

Remove the word ‘got’ and the question makes more sense.  The result of that question might well be a tie.  In the Republican Party, it seems, all dicks are created equal.

Over here in Jolly Old England, we rise above that kind of puerile nonsense.  Don’t we?

Not for much longer, methinks.  We always seem to follow American customs, especially the worst of them.

The prime minister and the mayor of London are already trading insults, in that case over the respective benefits of being in or out Europe, of course, not their relative genital endowments, but it could get more personal before long.  The cabinet is likewise split.  So is the Conservative Party.

Split, that is, between ‘inners’ and ‘outers’.  We are all inners or outers now, every man jack of us.  Women, too.

Now, if that’s not the kind of terminology to bring genitalia into the discourse of our own political right wing I don’t know what is.

Labour leaders, meanwhile, are saying nothing.  I wonder if that’s because ….. well, never mind – but you know what they always say about the Hard Left.