Tuesday
Last week my mother and I visited our local CVS and got our fourth Covid shot, which means that we are now doubled vaxxed and double boosted. As I strode out, feeling empowered and immune, a scene from Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest came to mind.
It’s the pose that McMurphy strikes after going through a series of electroshock treatments. Despite the toll they take on him, he appears as confident and arrogant as ever. As narrator Chief Bromden reports, McMurphy claims the treatment supercharges his sexual powers:
They gave McMurphy three more treatments that week. As quick as he started coming out of one, getting the click back in his wink, Miss Ratched would arrive with the doctor and they would ask him if he felt like he was ready to come around and face up to his problem and come back to the ward for a cure. And he’d swell up, aware that every one of those faces on Disturbed had turned toward him and was waiting, and he’d tell the nurse he regretted that he had but one life to give for his country and she could kiss his rosy red ass before he’d give up the goddam ship. Yeh!
Then stand up and take a couple of bows to those guys grinning at him while the nurse led the doctor into the station to phone over to the Main Building and authorize another treatment.
Once, as she turned to walk away, he got hold of her through the back of her uniform, gave her a pinch that turned her face red as his hair. I think if the doctor hadn’t been there, hiding a grin himself, she would’ve slapped McMurphy’s face.
I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. “When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten- thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger.”
As I reread the scene, I thought of Jack Nicholson playing McMurphy in Milos Forman’s film version of the novel. In his Oscar-winning performance, Nicholson vibrates with life energy, seemingly impervious to anything that the medical bureaucrats can do to him.
Unfortunately, rereading Kesey’s novel also reminded me of just how sexist and racist it is. A domineering woman and Black security guards emasculate the white male inmates (oh, and Chief Bromden), leaving it up to McMurphy to fight for white masculinity. Seen that way, the book would be more aptly applied to the latest cause taken up by Fox’s Tucker Carlson: the collapse of testosterone levels in American men.
The collapse is actually world-wide and may be attributable to rises in male obesity, but Carlson, of course, attributes it to liberals and the Democratic Party. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports on Carlson’s “documentary”:
There’s the usual racist fearmongering: After the trailer shows several fit White bodies, the first Black body to appear is obese (as President John F. Kennedy intones that “there is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children”), and an image from a street riot is used to convey “weak” America. There’s obsession with gender and sexuality: A shirtless man throws a javelin that turns into a flaming rocket; a man squeezes a cow’s udder; and other men, several also shirtless, exercise, fire a gun, wrestle, flip a tractor tire, swing an ax, swallow raw eggs and, of course, stand naked in front of red lights.
There’s the Trump right’s celebration of masculinity as aggression rather than chivalry or gentlemanliness, a notion promoted lately by Sen Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka. In the trailer, words appear on the screen over President Biden stumbling on Air Force One’s stairs and Democratic senators kneeling in tribute to George Floyd: “Good times made weak men; weak men made hard times.”
Although Kesey was a forerunner of the counterculture, his 1962 novel also anticipates the rightwing reaction to the advances made by women and people of color later in the decade—a reaction that would eventually propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. We can also see in Kesey the white male resentment that would fuel Trump’s candidacy, not to mention the current GOP’s anarchistic embrace of a politics of chaos. In McMurphy’s rebellion, women and Black men are to be put in their proper place.
Of course, it’s just an act of bravado that has McMurphy claiming that electroshock will light up his lovemaking. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, uses his documentary to endorse claims that “red light therapy” will increase testosterone levels. He’s touting junk science but when has that ever stopped Fox pundits?