“It weirds me out.” As a grammatical “purist” (so pure that I even put “purist” in quotation marks), I of course deplore this verb “to weird [s.o.] out” and the slacker impersonal construction meaning, approximately, “I feel icky.” Yet somehow the words seemed appropriate to describe my reaction to the sight of some half a million men gathered on the national Mall in Washington on October 4 to hug and cry and hold hands. The deplorable fin de siècle spectacle elicits an equally deplorable fin de siècle locution. Which is only to say that I am not an apologist for the Promise Keepers, nor for religious enthusiasts in general, nor for those who play the late twentieth-century game of displaying emotion in public in order to establish their political bona fides in the eyes of some cretin of a TV reporter. But what a splendid illustration the Promise Keepers rally provided of the way in which the media work in concert to shape a story to fit with their own political consensus and their mythopoeic assumptions.
In this case, it was The Washington Post which took the lead in setting up the frame of reference in which the story would almost invariably appear in the rest of the media. As early as August, the Post was reporting prominently not on the PKthemselves but on the “campaign” by the National Organization for Women “to take the mask off” these men and reveal them as, in reality, enslavers of