Fascists Don't Get To Claim Whatever Symbols They Want
Particularly these soft, weak men.
Walking my dog through the neighborhood the other day, a man driving by too quickly to identify wanted to let me know he thought I was a fucking bitch. He rolled down his window (or maybe it was already rolled down) and yelled, “you fucking bitch!” before the Doppler effect thinned out his voice, and then he was gone. Mission accomplished.
It’s possible I misinterpreted what happened. I didn’t see this person or immediately recognize the make of his car. I didn’t notice anyone else walking up or down either side of the block. But 16th Street is a busy thoroughfare. Maybe it was road rage. Maybe he was arguing or clowning around with someone riding along with him. Maybe he was a problem child on the phone with his mother.
But I’m pretty sure he was yelling at me. And what’s more, I think he had a decent reason—at least as far as these things go. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly. I was minding my own business, safely on the sidewalk across the median from him. But I was wearing this weighted training vest…
…and—at a glance, or if you aren’t using all of your common sense— it does make me look like an ICE agent1. I also happened to be walking just a few blocks south of a nearby park where, for a time earlier this year, federales and metro police would congregate between joint patrols.
The “fucking bitch” guy seemingly mistook me for one of them, off duty from harassing or abducting members of his community. The next day a neighbor who actually knows me spotted me wearing the same vest and said she thought it was part of a bad-taste Halloween costume. My own saintly wife wishes I wouldn’t wear it outside the house, particularly when we’re walking the dog together. We all at some level understand that everyone’s on edge and tempers are running hot. Not that this guy should have screamed “fucking bitch!” at me. But, you know, we understand.
The vest is designed primarily for an activity called rucking. The GoRuck company, which manufactures the vest pictured above, makes products for ruckers, and organizes rucking events—outdoor endurance challenges of varying difficulty meant to recreate special-operations training exercises in civilian spaces. Participants have to walk long distances and complete group tasks under a load of at least 20 pounds.
These events are wholesome, though a bit weird if you aren’t a joiner or don’t enjoy cosplay. But anyone who hikes or walks or jogs under load is rucking, and that’s typically how I use the term. I’ve been a rucker in that sense for about a decade. For most of that time I conceived of it as a distinct activity: block off some time, choose a walking trail, load up, and hike for miles. In recent weeks, though, to advance an unrelated goal, I began treating more quotidian tasks like dog walking and commuting as opportunities to ruck.
Earlier this year I decided I would retrain myself to complete a strict2 muscle-up before the end of summer.
As an accountability measure, I mentioned this to my friend Mikala Jamison, who writes a culture-of-fitness newsletter called Body Type, when she interviewed me about the messy intersection of politics, exercise, and male psychology.
Well, summer came and went, and it’s still just a goal. Performing a muscle-up with proper technique requires a lot of strength, and if you don’t quite have it, your options are: get stronger still, or shed a few pounds. I think I’ll get there before too long. But the last time I was able to pull myself up, out, and over the top like this, I was about 28, and could adapt in either of these ways much more easily. Today, a big push for an extra increment of upper-body strength is likelier to cause a shoulder injury than make me noticeably stronger in a short time. Shedding a few pounds by supplementing resistance training with running worked like a charm for me 15 years ago, but now it bangs up my knees. And I’ve already pared eating and drinking back about as far as my self-restraint will tolerate.
This is where a weighted training vest comes in handy. The fitness world is full of get-thin-quick schemes—hacks to squeeze calorie burn out of life with minimal time commitment, or without wasting muscle. High-intensity training will supposedly keep your metabolism cranked for hours after a workout, through the excess post-exercise oxygen-consumption effect. Joints a bit dusty? Just set a treadmill at an incline and walk uphill for an hour, and don’t compensate by increasing your food intake.
These methods do work if you have the time or flexibility, but for me, a weighted training vest provides a more practical and sustainable alternative. If you already walk a lot, as I do, you can make yourself marginally heavier, and, thus, burn more calories per mile.
When I failed to hit my September muscle-up deadline, I realized I couldn’t hit my next one safely without dropping several pounds of body weight. So I started rucking as a matter of course.
This explains my encounter with the “fucking bitch” guy.
Why not just ditch the vest? GoRuck also sells rucking backpacks, which don’t have quite the same paramilitary aesthetic, and thus create no social tension. Couldn’t I just load up one of those instead.
Yes I could. But I am a stubborn person. I paid for the vest, I like it, and it’s not my fault Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and various other stunted men transformed gear that had little cultural baggage into a fascism high-sign.
There’s also a mechanical issue. Wearing a weighted pack shifts your center of gravity backward, and it’s natural to compensate for that over long distances and up hills by slouching forward. With a vest you can distribute weight evenly around your torso, and thus maintain better posture.
I also just think, as a matter of principle, no one should concede anything to Trump and Miller, no matter how trivial. Maybe this is just another way of re-confessing my stubbornness, but I recoil at the thought of allowing them to lay claim to anything in the culture that isn’t already rotten. If you’re a Washington Nationals fan, the foolish way other people voted shouldn’t impel you to shelve your favorite baseball cap. A hat is replaceable, but sentimental value isn’t really.
They are the ones who want police officers to look like soldiers and soldiers to evoke repression, racial profiling, domestic occupation. They’d be thrilled if something as innocuous as children playing cops and robbers became divisive, and further sorted Americans politically. And the irony is, the men driving this polarization are soft, mentally and physically. Donald Trump could not walk from the Oval Office to the hole in the ground where the East Wing used to be with 20 pounds on his back. Stephen Miller could not complete a GoRuck challenge, due either to physical weakness or poor sportsmanship or both. More than a third of new ICE recruits have reportedly failed a very lenient fitness test. They should be the ones embarrassed by all this cosplay, not well-meaning civilians.
They’re the ones treating real men as pawns.
In all our discourse about male loneliness and alienation, we’ve given short shrift to the many ways political leaders have choked off healthy or neutral expressions of masculinity. They want masculine things, or really any kind of disciplined hobbyism, to signal political and cultural allegiance. When well-meaning strangers come to view ruckers and sport fighters and regular police and actual service members with more suspicion than they’ve earned, that’s all the better for the fascists.
If MAGA tribalists cared about the health and social standing of men, they’d give all this tactical gear to people who could use it for real productive purposes, and return to enforcing the law like grown-up public servants. But that’s not what they’re after.
I’m sensitive to the critique that it’s wrong to make other people uncomfortable to prove some abstract and petty point about resisting fascism. More male-ego bullshit. I think that’s what my wife is getting at, and she’s not wrong.
But I still believe that we should contest the public meaning of things. Symbols are fluid, their meaning is determined by who uses them and how. Concede a vest here, a pull-up challenge there, and eventually the visual language of fitness and discipline will be fully co-opted by people who understand neither.
There are also other, compatible ways to put people at ease. GoRuck vests and backpacks are adorned with hook-and-loop panels for affixing velcro patches. After the “fucking bitch” incident, I ordered a DC flag patch, and another that says FUCK ICE. I’m also more prone to waving and smiling at strangers when I’m rucking in the neighborhood.
Then, once I’ve achieved this training goal, I won’t need to walk around the neighborhood in a heavy vest anymore—the weight-loss purpose will have been served. At this pace I should be lean enough to clear the bar by February, plus or minus a couple weeks to account for holiday gluttony.
But I’ll still wear the thing whenever inspiration strikes. It wasn’t cheap! And now it’s come to signify things that matter to me: that strength is built through discipline and repetition, not performed through intimidation. That we don’t have to concede symbols or spaces or hobbies just because fascists try to claim them.
Or maybe a CBP agent… I don’t walk around covering my face with a gator like a total psycho.
As opposed to kipping muscle ups, which require less upper-body strength and technique, and, as a less controlled movement, can be very hard on the shoulders.
Brian, I suggest pairing an embroidered Pride flag patch with a POW/MIA patch; you can get either for less than 10 bucks and even an illiterate goon will understand where you stand.
Hey, we reclaimed frogs. Anything is possible.