US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man by Charlie LeDuff

US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man Charlie LeDuff. Penguin Press, New York, 2006 I first saw Charlie LeDuff on his ten-part television program, Only in America. It was an interesting, if uncomfortable, look at how the average US man struggles to achieve some semblance of meaning in a confused and changing world. I next saw LeDuff on The Colbert Report when he was pitching the book, US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man, which is based on the exploits that were the subject of his television show. The book could have been an essentialist and nostalgic look at an idealized US masculinity immersed in crisis, one that whitewashes the experiences of people of color, gay men, the poor, and the generally marginalized. I was pleasantly surprised to find that LeDuff makes no attempt to offer up such a vision. Indeed, after providing a list of masculine stereotypes, LeDuff states, "of course, no such man has ever existed and no man probably ever will" (x). LeDuff also rejects the contemporary specter of crisis, instead arguing that crises have existed across space and time: "They say the American man is falling to pieces; that he is spooked, spiritually deadened, dissociated, infantilized. That's just the television talking. There's nothing wrong with us guys, except everything. But that's the way it's always been" (xii). Rather than reaching back to some romanticized past, LeDuff's book is located squarely in the murky, discomfiting reality of twenty-first century life. The picture that he paints is not a pretty one and the language that he uses to describe it is frequently stark and occasionally coarse. He takes us across America in search of "the angry, forgotten middling America from where I come" (xi). In so doing, he evokes an image of America that is in strong need of repair. Drawing on the assertion of John Edwards that there are two Americas, the haves and have-nots, LeDuff argues that "there is at least a third America, the have somewhats, and a fourth, the self-defeated, the people who fell off the table and are never getting up to the supper plate" (3). One sees shards of these people when he visits a circus, motorcycle fight club, gay rodeo, semi-professional football league, religious revival, war re-enactment, the Burning Man Festival, and other sundry locations and events. There are no answers here, only questions, deep and troubling questions: "This book is not a sociological study. It offers no solutions to the problems of crime, immigration, the economy, spiritual bankruptcy or other maladies afflicting the male citizen of the United States of America" (x-xi). Yet many of the problems LeDuff outlines do not affect just males and perhaps that is why his comments on masculinity sometimes slip to the background. These are American problems and in reviewing LeDuff's observations it becomes clear that America is suffering from a crisis in leadership and a lack of focus on how to solve macro-level issues stemming from globalization, race relations, and poverty as well as micro-level problems like spiritual confusion, and the ennui of life. LeDuff's visit to the homicide division of the Detroit Police Department is particularly striking as he focuses on "death in a dying city" (156). He begins the chapter by recounting a conversation the detectives have about the beheading of an Arab-American woman, killed at her husband's hands because of an alleged affair. LeDuff points out that the detectives seemed more interested in her breasts, which "every guy in the precinct stopped by to look at" (150), than her murder. LeDuff is tongue in check as he points out the audacity of the situation: "Tits. You can't help but stare at them, whether they're attached to a headless corpse or they appear in your run-of-the-mill crime scene photograph" (150). This same perverse callousness seems to appear in an inappropriate crime scene photograph of a murder victim, a prostitute, who perished at the hands of a serial killer (151). …