Wrecking Balls

In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage.

As 2025 begins, there is already so much drama that I have removed my brain to the dreamy equivalent of a room next door. There is something calming about knowing that partisan media hysteria is now dead in the ratings water. In a Hulk Hogan world, imagine the futility of trying to defend a Kamala Harris administration, with her cabinet appointments painstakingly chosen for ethnic and gender representation, or railing against the endless battering ram of the other side’s impeachment efforts, or trying to stay tuned to earnest Democratic efforts to keep all the failed lawfare against Trump alive. I have forgotten Governor Tim Walz so fast I had to Google his surname. The beaten-down storylines of the last few years are melting away as fast as our belly fat after a few shots of Ozempic.

In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It's as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed.

Credit: BBC

Is it any wonder that negative attention has come to define needy virility? I was particularly struck by the screed left by the Las Vegas Cybertruck nut, who was clearly addled from too many years of low-level blasts from lethal weapons as much as from a media diet apparently full of apocalyptic conspiracy theories promoted by Rumble. “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” he wrote in a suicide note. “What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?” Yeah, what better way, Officer Livelsberger — or, for that matter, pin-up assassin Luigi Mangione, or brooding ISIS convert Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who recorded himself describing his rejected plan to wipe out his own family instead of 14 innocent New Year’s revelers as he maniacally drove his death wagon from Houston to Bourbon Street. Pay attention! Pay attention to my spectacle of violence!

But why should I pay attention? Why are all these male human wrecking balls so driven by the need to be seen and heard in the first place? Social media has made everyone a star in their own mind, but I am tired of the futile inspection of their repetitive homicidal motives on cable news, their broken marriages, their financial failures, their normal if withdrawn interactions with their stunned neighbors. I am tired of the implication of guilt because none of us noticed another killer in our midst about to blow. I am angry that the military doesn’t care enough for the PTSD soldiers decommissioned with the adult equivalent of shaken baby syndrome.

But have any of these sullen, kamikaze psychos ever observed the loneliness and financial desperation of half the women on their street? Their lives of domestic abuse cohabiting with men like them? Women have been used to being ignored since time immemorial and yet, most of the time, they slog on, trying to keep it together for the sake of the kids. They rarely feel the need to convert their private miseries into public mayhem and post it on social media. So, to the late officer Livelsberger and the rest of his cohort, I am sorry you feel guilty about your actions in Afghanistan—with an American exit so feckless Biden’s entire national security staff should have resigned—but try being a woman living there under the Taliban now that you’ve left. Any chance you or anyone else will pay attention to her? Or to that insignificant woman living a few yards away from you in the house with the curtains drawn?

Noseworthy

How pleasing to read in Air Mail that there is rising appreciation for men with big noses. Apparently, the number of rhinoplasty procedures performed in 2023 to reduce male beak size had declined by 43% since 2000. Paul Mescal, Adam Driver, and newly crowned Golden Globe winner Adrien Brody are leading the way. (Bradley Cooper’s fake Leonard Bernstein honker in Maestro didn't really cut it, somehow.) But there is no mention here of the glory of big-nosed women, though some of my favorite faces are defined by haughty, insurrectionary profiles like that of Sophia Loren (who once declared, “If I have to change my nose, I am going back to Pozzuoli.”), Angelica Huston, Lady Gaga, or my personal girl crush, the Parisian jolie laide Camille Cottin, from Call My Agent. In an interview with Vogue, supermodel Bella Hadid admitted she regrets getting a nose job at age 14. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she lamented. “I think I would have grown into it.”

I am not so sure. I always told myself that my high-bridged nose had an aristocratic flavor. Think 20s social grande dame Lady Diana Cooper, or the Bloomsbury icon Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was all chic beak under an enormous flowered hat. I have long adored the posh, upscale bump on the nose of Slow Horses star Kristin Scott Thomas. But now I discover yet another downside to aging. After obsessing all my life about dress size, my nose has put on weight. It has widened at the end. It was a shock to look in the mirror recently and see that my proboscis now resembles F. Murray Abraham’s. And contrary to any advice I might get from Air Mail, a Park Avenue plastic surgeon—who confirmed that this is a very common facial change at my age—has been booked to fix it.

Once upon a time, I looked forward to my Lady Bracknell phase, when I would sport a steel-gray bun, sensible shoes, and the modern equivalent of a pince-nez. I anticipated with pleasure becoming a mono-bosomed woman of substance who wielded power through intellect, not sex. But regardless of what style section articles tell you about older actresses’ efflorescence, America has outlawed women who allow themselves to look old. We just have to go on working twice as hard to look half as good. When will our pathetic attempts at glamour maintenance ever end?

Snort Report

Now that my son Georgie has moved out of my back bedroom to an apartment up the block, my daughter Izzy insists I need some four-footed company. (I have been pet free since Dozy, our beloved orange cat, passed to her heavenly rest last year at the remarkable age of 21.) Readers will know that I have since fallen hopelessly in love with Izzy’s female English bulldog Gimli, and I am pondering obsessively whether I should have a dog of my own. The trouble is, bulldogs are now the only breed I crave. I don’t want some yappy little Yorkie or a tiny, silly Shih Tzu, or a snobby Frenchie with its bat cave ears. No, the only dog I want is a smoosh-faced, jowly English bulldog with a dubious expression who sleeps with his tongue out and lies on his back snoring with his paws in the air—think the stereotypical paunchy, blue-collar husband wearing what once was unfortunately termed a wifebeater, with an open can of beer by the bed.

So what holds me back? As Izzy constantly reminds me, bulldogs are bonkers. Do I really need another member of the family who has OCD? A dog that is so maniacally obsessed with buckets she can spend a whole day trying to cram one through the too-small door of her crate? Who goes batshit at the sight of a broom? Who devours her food with such unseemly noise and kibble-flying abandon the kitchen looks like a crime scene when she’s gobbled the bowl clean? Moreover, the whole point of a dog is taking it for a walk. When I am on Gimli duty, no sooner are we out on the sidewalk than she pancakes and refuses to move. We are the laughingstock of every high-stepping cockapoo on Beekman Place.

So, instead, I signed up to adopt two four-month-old male kittens I planned to call Gus and Monty and envisioned them rubbing around my legs with a welcoming purr when I got in. However, someone else took these charming brothers and somehow I wound up with two identical, hissing black females that I felt compelled to call Hocus and Pocus because they spring from the closet making a spitting sound like an exploding fuse, terrifying me and everybody else. They are trouble incarnate these two tittering Gen Z sisters, plotting new ways to make mischief at every turn. How I shall break the news of them joining the family to Baroness Gimli, I do not know.