As tragic and terrifying as it was, there was at least one remarkable and largely unremarked upon thing about the attack on our capitol last week. Trumpism and Testosterone, the signs of our time, hit their high watermark.

The Stupid White Boys followed their leader to Insurrection Mountain and lost the biggest battle they will ever fight. I would never want to take them lightly, but I am even more reluctant to give them more credit than they deserve.

I am ashamed to admit it.

I want to cry every time I see their photos, but I also can’t help but laugh. Like their Master/Leader, they manage to mess up every single thing they do because, like him, they have no real idea of what they are doing or where it might lead.

At times, it seemed like the attackers were just plain stupid in the way of so many Stupid White Boys I saw all around me when I was a kid. I remember Mr. Grover in middle school shouting at a bunch of bullies in the schoolyard: “the problem with you boys is that you think with your penises, not your brains!

Truer words.

Watching the news that troubling day, I remember thinking they were so happy to have broken into the capitol, and perhaps so shocked, they forget what they were supposed to do there and left.

There are certain traits Stupid White Boys exhibit unfailingly, whether they are bullying the weak, shouting racist slurs at people of color, raging about having to wear masks, bumbling a plot to kidnap a governor, pooping on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, taking selfies of themselves without quite knowing that they are committing a crime.

Here are the most common traits of Stupid White Boys, judge for yourself if they fit some of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

I saw many things watching the coverage of the assault; one of them was a real-time documentary about Testosterone and what it can do to the weak-minded.

1. Stupid White Boys always find a Smart But Mean White Boy to follow. He usually thinks for them, picks his targets, brings up their testosterone, bullies them. Trump is our first Testosterone President. The Stupid White Boys will do anything for him, even the things that are almost sure to get them into trouble.

Getting into trouble is the highest calling for a Stupid White Boy (there are probably stupid Black Boys too, but I never met any dumb enough to bust into the capitol and take photos of themselves peeing on the floor to offer up to the FBI on the Internet. At least their wear masks.)

2.Stupid White Boys Never Do Their Homework, which is for girls and sissy white boys who follow the rules. It was fascinating for me to realize that the Stupid White Boys, Trump Division, had no idea that Trump had been defeated and would not be President next week.

They really don’t know.

They seemed to expect that as heroic patriots (I don’t recall Jefferson half-naked and wearing Viking horns or crapping on the convention floor and wiping it on the walls)

They believed that all the police officers and most of the country would rush to join their Revolution and help them hang Vice President Pence and Nancy Pelosi.

Even in the Digital Age, not too many felons take selfies to mail to social media sites and post on their websites.

I read one story about how the FBI are just browsing the Internet and mopping up the Stupid White Boys like fishermen scooping up schools of lobsters in their nets.

There are countless videos of them trespassing, threatening and attacking the police, defecating and urinating on the hallowed halls, preening in vandalized offices, hauling out podiums, laptops, and statues. If you look at the costumes, as I did,  you might wonder if there is a Drag Queen subdivision of the Stupid Boys; they love to dress up.

Do real terrorists like to dress up?

“It doesn’t feel like real terrorists,” one FBI agent was quoted as saying in the New York Times. “They don’t leave all those videos and selfies for us to find.”

3.Which brings us to another trait of the Stupid White Boys – Moms. When they get into trouble, they always run home to their moms, where the police always go to pick them up: no shootouts, no flights across state lines, no Bonnie and Clyde standoffs.

Three of the capitol attackers were photographed with their mothers, who came with them to the riot, and once or twice, came inside to see the fun.

As awful as it was, it wasn’t like real terrorists because real terrorists don’t show up in funny uniforms and prance in drag and parade around for their friends to photograph. And they don’t invite mom.

The idea is to bring down the government, not find an agent.

Real terrorists don’t go online for weeks promising to attack and hurt people and offering details of how and when.

They show up and hurt people. I had this sickening feeling that real terrorists would have slaughtered half the congress if the Capitol Police were the only thing in their way that day.

It would be a mistake to trivialize what the Stupid White Boys did, but it would also be a mistake to build them up and give them more credit than they deserve.  Like Trump himself, they fail at almost everything they do.

They deserve all the punishment they get, and more, yet there was this odd sensation that for most of them, killing people wasn’t really the point or the goal.

The most curious thing about the assault was there was no goal, no sane end game, not one thing to show for it other than scaring the wits out of half the country and killing a police officer.

The election was over; Trump was leaving. The Stupid White Boys are about the only people left in America who don’t know that. “We are here to save our President,” one rioter screamed aloud.

Really? How did that work out for him, I wonder?

Perhaps the real point was getting to dress up and save some penises around. It is difficult to fathom how many people could fail to see how hopeless their journey to Washington was. And many of them may never quite get it. Stupid White Boys sometimes grow up to be Stupid White Men. One might even get to be President one day.

It’s a great job. You can run your mouth, lie, and cheat. And there will always be Stupid White Boys to fight for you.

You don’t have to think about what you are doing, you don’t have to research what you doing, and you absolutely never consider the consequences of what you are doing.

The Big Smart White Boy tells you to move, and you move. The Smart White Boy tells you that he is getting screwed, and you rush to fight for him. Stupid White Boys have been doing this for all of recorded human civilization; it has something, I think, to do with adrenaline and testosterone.

I can’t imagine a mob of women crashing into the U.S. capitol like that and trashing the place. I can’t really say why.

The women I know fight in different ways, and increasingly, smarter ones. There were plenty of women in the capitol last week – one was shot to death by police – but the sense from all of the imagery was that this was a Donald Trump Production all the way – dramatic, irresponsible, a Pagan male ritual almost, unthinking, false at its core.

Through social media, Trump has built himself an army of zombie-obedient Stupid White Boys who love guns, costumes, big trucks, big flags, big boats, big banners. You don’t have to be Freud to figure it out.

Trump is the Big Penis, and all the other penises follow like minnows in a pond.

Taken together, the photos show us a bizarre conglomeration of strange beards, lots of camo and ammo, bare chests, and the imagery of seething – it would be sensual it wasn’t so foolish –  so much masculinity.

Plenty of these images were terrifying.

So many of them were theater, so many of them were inane, And none of them accomplished what they promised to do on all their tough websites  – stop the election, overturn it, or capture and intimidate Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. ( I have not seen persuasive evidence that they planned to kill them.)

If Trump is no Hitler, the Stupid White Boys are no Hitler Youth.

Like him, they are full of big talk and they don’t seem to know how to accomplish much of anything other than to make people crazy and scared.

The FBI asked Zip Tie Guy why he was carrying Zip Ties around the capitol. He said he found them on the floor. Even if he was lying, he just doesn’t cut it as a real terrorist, who wouldn’t bother to make up such a silly story.

In a way, the capitol attack was the high watermark of Trumpist masculinity.  Trumpism has always been about men, about fighting off the women’s movement, waving those Confederate flags, keeping people from “shithole” countries out of America, keeping America Christian and white. And male.

It hasn’t worked. It can’t work. It won’t work.

One of the most fearful rioters – QAnon Shaman a.k.a. Jake Angeli, announced in his first court appearance that he could not eat jail food because it wasn’t all organic.

I don’t recall Pablo Escobar or the 911 terrorists demanding organic food.

Brandon Fellows, the Stupid White Boy who arrived wearing a knit hat resembling a knight’s helmet and fake beard, and who was allegedly photograph smoking a joint in a Democratic Senator’s office, told Bloomberg News: “I didn’t hurt anyone, I didn’t break anything, I did trespass though, I guess.’

Duh. And that’s against the law, Brandon. And you could go to jail.

No wonder we can’t reason with them, and increasingly, don’t want to try?

Brandon added proudly that his Bumble dating profile, now updated with pictures of himself at the Capitol, was “blowing up.” Ah, now we get it. The jail time will be worth it.

“The capitol riot was the apotheosis of  Trumpism,” write Monica Hesse in The Washington Post this week. “There was just enough boobish amateurism and eye-rolling absurdity on the surface to give cover to those tempted to dismiss a deadly serious attack on the American system as some version of “boys will be boys.”

But still, do truly dangerous terrorists commit crimes and go home to Mom and Dad and wait politely for the FBI to come and get them? No secret hideouts, fake passports, elaborate escape plans?

Their real weapons are websites and Twitter and Facebook and Amazon and crackpot hate forums.

It is easy to be tough online, and cheer at rallies, it’s so much harder when the guns and consequences are real, as many of them are learning this week.

As a result of their ignorance and gullibility, they have lost touch with reality, a fatal flaw for real Badasses.

The week’s latest hysteria has these boobs attacking every State House in the country. This is yet another thing Osama Bin Laden did not do – put his plans online.

A week from the inauguration there are already 20,000 soldiers and cops in Washington ringing the inauguration and many thousands more out rounding up the Stupid White Boys, home to brag about their trip to Insurrection Mountain.

White Boy Number One, no less a figure than our President, was pleased as this stunning show of Trumpist masculinity; he was beaming and full of love,  like a proud Papa bursting with pride at the triumph of his football champion sons.

Monday, a campaign press secretary went on television to describe President Trump as “the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.”

Finally, somebody there told the truth to us.

The Stupid White Boy Insurrection is a tragic thing to see, for them, for us. Donald Trump has no idea what it means to be a real man.

And he has taught a bunch of Stupid White Boys the same thing, along with half of the congress.

But I would be cautious of seeing them as more than they are.

September 6, wrote Hesse, showed us the Trump brand, “a combination of inchoate fury and utter buffoonery, feeding on each other as they become more angry and more preposterous. It was that aspiring insurrectionist, scaling a railing with all the artifacts of a domestic terrorism coup. It was that dude from the steakhouse, hanging out with his mom.”

They had the artifacts, but not the heart, and not the cause.

I had this thought over and over again, watching those tapes and videos.

They can hurt us, frighten us, and drive us mad. There is no way they can beat us.