By Barry Rubin
Here’s the famous Charles Atlas advertisement.
A skinny guy and pretty young woman in a bikini are walking on the beach. A big bully makes fun of him. When the skinny guy protests, the bully punches him, telling him to shut up.
“Darn it,” says Skinny Guy, “I’m tired of being a skinny scarecrow.” So to stop being a “97-pound weakling,” he joins the Charles Atlas Club, works out, gets muscles, and some time later (in front of the admiring young woman) he punches out the bully. The girl says, “Oh Joe you are a real he-man after all.”
Let’s analyze this advertisement as a lesson in foreign policy. How would the Obama Administration and contemporary expert/academic version of this ad go?
A skinny guy with an AK-47 and a young woman in a bikini he has kidnapped are walking on the beach. A muscular guy, let’s call him Mr. Superpower, wants to stop him. When the skinny guy tries to harm his hostage, the other guy, let’s call him Sam Superpower, punches him and frees the woman.
“Darn it!,” says Sam Superpower. “I’m tired of pushing other countries around and being guilty of all sorts of human rights violations, ethnocentric value judgments, social injustice, greedy imperialist behavior, and supporting dictators.” So he joins the Don Knotts Club and goes on a diet (realizing he’s been eating more than his fair share of nutritious food) and becomes very weak.
In the next scene Sam Superpower is walking on the beach and the formerly Skinny Guy, who has bulked up (with the use of petrodollars, terrorism, revolutionary Islamist ideology, ruthless dictatorship, and perhaps nuclear weapons) comes over and punches him out, then starts robbing and beating up all the nearby people, including other skinny guys.
As the (former) Mr. Superpower lies bleeding on the sand, the young woman (who has been educated in Politically Correct and Multicultural indoctrination centers, I mean schools) leaves the ex-Skinny Guy (now Big Bully) and decides to become the girlfriend of the ex-Big Bully (now Skinny Guy).
She says: “Oh Sam, you are a real respecter of international law, Political Correctness, social justice, and Multicultural egalitarianism as well as a 97-pound weakling man after all!”
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and Middle East editor and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His articles published originally in places other than PajamasMedia can be found at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
Problem is the new Big Bully is not about to let that young woman go anywhere. That’s why he’s a big bully and that’s why her indoctrination is money down the drain.
I chuckled, reading this, as I am of age to remember the advertisements in comic books regarding the skinny guy on the beach, the pretty girl (bikini? not in those days) and the bully. Charles Atlas was kind of a semi-hero to all us boys. I’d say the USA needs its own “Charles Atlas” now just to re-invigorate this nation of, at best, ambivalent heroes.
I was going to say we have Chuck Norris to get a chuckle but in reality we have guys like John Bolton and his mustache.
Good column, Barry. (I, too, “am of the age.” *sigh*
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