86. "Testosterone"

I think maybe "testosterone" is the best word for what keeps getting Americans into places like Iraq. Not "hubris," not "pride." Those words are too classroom. We need a street word.

Not any old street word, though. It's got to be one we can use with ease and confidence — without losing weight.  And I think that "testosterone" has gone pop enough to work.

How would it go? I see Americans beating their drums for an invasion. We shout, "Check the testosterone! Check the testosterone!" They say, "Oh, oh, too much," and stop to give their action more thought. We eggheads have communicated with all the confidence of a popular talk-show host or advice columnist.

Testosterone is what Thucydides saw in the Athenians, "seldom enjoying their possessions because they are always adding to them.…They are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so." It's what Aeschylus and Sophocles saw in all men. Over-reaching. Dante, under the word "pride," made it the foundation for every other sin. Our word "testosterone" may sound pop but it hooks into a lot of weighty material.

So it gives us a way to tell the nation, and maybe the world, what it needs most: a good hormone manager. Like Elizabeth I. Oh, could she handle testosterone! I mean, half the royal balls in Europe ("Me! Me! Marry me!") and all the important noble ones — Raleigh, Essex, Drake — in England were hers to manipulate. Or like Pope Urban II, who pointed the really loaded ones at the Holy Land.

The whole world lacked such a manager in the years before World War I. What a loss to Europe! Great Power, Great Power, you had to be a Great Power. Think of all those European lions, growling over the carcass of Africa. Not a tamer in sight.  It's a wonder World War I didn't break out sooner.

Why aren't we Americans better at testosterone management? We have a big army. Who learns testosterone management better than a paratroop colonel? All those young men coming out of jump school, West Point, full of beans. Macho bursting out in all directions. Fights in the bars. Swagger in the O-clubs. He's got to channel it toward the enemy. "Keep your goddam mind on the goddam mission," he says to the lieutenant off on some extra-curricular heroics.

Free-floating testosterone, it's such a problem. In the Pacific it wanted to charge right over without waiting for the new carriers. In the poolrooms it wanted France now, now, before we had the landing craft.

What, let me ask you, was behind the Army's closing off Gordon Liddy's career? Fear of free-floating testosterone. Knowledge of it was just what the FBI lacked when they sent him out undercover to a town in Indiana and he blew the mission by swagger in a bar. "Try taking an airport with guys like that," says the colonel, "and you'll learn something about testosterone."

Some of our leaders have been pretty good at blocking unwanted testosterone.  Nimitz put a quick cork on the kind that would have had us charge west without the firepower, and Roosevelt certainly stifled those who wanted Normandy in '43.

It's in men who have had no experience of war — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Liddy — that the testosterone seems to float most freely. They're the ones you've really got to watch. Give in to them and you could be looking at a busted country.

And they're the ones who make Elizabeth look like such a …what? a gift from God.  She had no experience of war, and oh how she handled those guys. Oh what she gave the country. Years of peace and a surplus in the treasury. How did she do it?

I think it has to be imagination. Learning. Ability to speak to ambassadors in their own language. Good tutors, hard study. Attention to detail. Self-control. A little eggy, yes, but what a contrast with George W. Bush!