Today, I'm feeling incredibly vulnerable. I have been watching in horror and creeping dread as the
manticore of rightwing policies casts its shadow on me and my children.
Most days, I feel like Medusa, ready to fucking turn to stone anyone who dares threaten my daughters. Someone will literally have to cut my head off to get me to shut up. But not today. Today, I'm frightened.
In a moment of vulnerability and fear this morning, I asked a very close male friend to do something that, in hindsight, I shouldn't have asked him to do. I asked him to take responsibility for something that is really mine, and in asking him, I alienated him. It got me to thinking about male anger. It got me to thinking about daddies. It got me to thinking about this culture, right now.
Part of this is an amends. Part of it a meditation. And part of it, I think, is political insight.
Yesterday, the College of Cardinals chose an angry old man to lead the Church. The U.S. government is
full of angry old men who berate and punish the rest of us who won't get in line. I keep looking for signs that the American public is going to stand up to them, but other than the voices of dissent I read on leftist blogs, I'm not seeing the groundwave of revulsion that I have been expecting. I have been expecting the other angry old men in the government to oppose them, and yesterday, finally, I did, when Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden bellowed at the attempted ramming of John Bolton up our collective ass.
But really? I find myself wondering if America doesn't long for Daddy's spank. So many people bemoan the loss of order in this culture: the hard, unyielding discipline meted out by daddy, the kind that scared us, the kind that made us behave ourselves for fear of getting into trouble. In the last forty years, things have been more fluid, more yielding, more liquid, and increasingly, covered by the mucus of borderlessness, some in our culture seem genuinely grossed out. Female bodies are icky for some, and perhaps they feel as if they've been living inside a cunt. The shapeless feminine.
I think back to the days after September 11. The infamous comments by Falwell and Robertson that this was our punishment for becoming such a morally lax society. Lax. If we had been more rigid, more tumescent, perhaps we could have asserted ourselves, penetrated them before they penetrated us.
We wanted a daddy. Oh, not the kind, gentle daddy that let us sit on his knee and assured us everything was going to be all right. Not that daddy. We wanted angry daddy. The one who was going to protect us. The one who would kick the shit out of anyone who threatened us. But that same daddy spanks us when we don't behave. And so, frightened by the monsters that lay in our collective bedroom closets, we summoned the mean daddy to take care of us. And we agreed, once again, to live by his rules.
But that daddy demands blind obedience. That daddy wants us to know our place. He is the head of household, he makes the rules, he wants his supper on the table and his children scrubbed clean and silent, he wants the quiet of the domestic sphere to come home to while he is doing his big, important work out there in the world, away from us.
Yesterday, as I watched the cardinals choose a mean daddy to be Il Papa, I wondered where Mommy was. Where is she? Who is going to step between mean daddy and the rest of us, offer to protect us? And I found myself bereft, frightened. I think it was then that I decided that I needed to find a big, strong man to step between me and the manticore. And that's when I made my stupid move this morning. And so for that, I make amends.
This afternoon, I realized that there are many, many people trembling in front of the mean daddy today--in all his various guises. He's off on a drunken tirade, denouncing the weak sons on the Supreme Court, denouncing his whorish daughters who want to have sex outside of marriage, denouncing his sissy-boy sons who prefer boys, denouncing his bastard mixed-race sons and daughters whose mothers he raped, and no one's standing up to him. He's drunk. We think he's going to rant for a while, sleep it off, and in the morning, he'll go back to being the patriarch who protects us if we fucking behave ourselves. You know what? He's a sick bastard. And he's not going to get better while we enable him. And he's too fucking drunk to protect us, but he's not too fucking drunk to destroy us while he lurches around.
I haven't got the kind of time it's going to take waiting to get rescued. And the manticore is coming after my children. So, I will set free the snakes in my hair and I will go off to face him.