The year is 2010. Two years from now. President John McCain finally loses his battle against cancer. There is a ceremony as laid down by the founding fathers. The office of the presidency of the United States of America transfers from President McCain (deceased) to President Palin.

President Palin…………..

From that moment there is an extra person in Sarah Palin’s security entourage.

There is a military officer with the attaché case as beloved of spy movies handcuffed to his wrist. This person is a commissioned officer in the U.S. military, pay-grade O-4 or above, who has undergone the nation’s most rigorous background check (Yankee White). This briefcase is codenamed “The football”. The contents of this briefcase in the wrong hands could end all human life on the planet.

The “wrong hands” is a US President who believes that we are in “the end of days”.

A President who believes that dinosaurs roamed the earth four thousand years ago.

It is correct that the officer entrusted with this world-ending piece of equipment has been thoroughly checked out.

Unfortunately President Palin the person who has the command authority to launch the ICBMs and initiate a nuclear winter wasn’t checked out at all by John McCain and his campaign team.

This is not the behaviour of a grown up culture. Nor is it the behaviour of a polity that has a long-term future.

A standard refrain from the  “the women’s movement” in the 1970s was that war was something that only men did .The implication was that men enjoyed going to war and women, because of their nurturing life giving role in human procreation , were the planet’s pacifists.

Like all insane ideologies feminism denies the subtlety of the human condition. All of us know aggressive warlike women and equally we know men who abhor confrontation.

Historically ,because of the physical demands of warfare, it was men who had to heft the sword and shoulder the pike.

All President Palin has to do is speak some words while peering into a retinal scanning device to play her own part in “ the end of days”.

When she was put on the Republican ticket two weeks ago an incriminating piece of video emerged on You Tube.

She was speaking to a “graduation class” in her church “the assembly of god” in her hometown of Wasilla Alaska.

Not only did she say that the invasion of Iraq was  “part of god’s plan” she believed that Alaska would be a sanctuary for the saved as the end of the world-as foretold in the Book of revelation- neared.

Palin is, of course, on the republican ticket to attract Hillary Clinton PUMA voters.

Party Unity My Ass voters maybe the final kick of a dying feminist animal in America. That a woman ,ANY woman, will do.

Even THAT woman will do.

Is that the legacy of feminism?

2010 the end of days?

Carol Hunt of the Sunday Independent in Ireland (www.unison.ie) is, I think, rather like John McCain.

It isn’t that she doesn’t care about male suicide.

She does.

It is that she just doesn’t get it.

She mentioned my book “Preventable Death” in a piece on Sunday 7^th September 2008.

She spent most of the column fulminating about the cover design.

Now I can no more take the credit for that book cover than I could a Rembrandt.

As our American cousins would say ” he hit it straight out of the park!”

I did say that I wanted the death certificate with cause of death ” feminism” on it. However the rest of the design and how my idea was brought to the cover was all the designers.

The reason I wanted such a mocked up death certificate on the cover of preventable death was that it summed up the central thesis of the book.

Interesting there wasn’t a single relative that I interviewed for the book-female or male-who complained about the book cover.

Feminism is indeed in the dock over the hundreds of our young men every year who die by their own hand.

However so many in public life owe their position to loyalty to that world view that even heaps and heaps of young male bodies every year brings them face-to-face with their very own Lord Denning moment.

To finally come around to the proposition that everything they believed about men, women, society and all of human affairs since their adolescence through university education and o0n into their professional lives-to believe that all of that was wrong.

That all of it was based on a nonsensical ideology.

That is such an appalling vista for them that it is better that these young men continue to die just as the Birmingham Six were sent back to prison in 1988 rather than Lord Denning have to face up to the reality that the entire English criminal justice system fitted up six innocent men simply because they were Irish in 1974.

Male suicide in Ireland, that body count of hundreds of young men every year, is the innocent man quietly incarcerated without a voice.

This is a huge miscarriage of social justice.

It is becoming more difficult for feminists like hunt to remain silent on the male suicide issue.

What we are witnessing in Ireland is an entrenched ideology, in social policy power, fighting for to retain its privileged position.

It isn’t a pretty sight.