April 20, 2005
Wanting Our Daddies
by Lorraine Berry
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 that 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. 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.
Posted by in Catholicism, Culture, Culture War, Dominionism, Empire, Extremists, Fascism, George Lakoff, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Religion, Rhetoric
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Say it loud, say it proud!
Wow. I have been an angry father, mostly at myself for being sucked down to the level of the insolent teen rather than being the adult about it all. But i haven't been the bully daddy. That is the one we seem to have all around us. Bolton is a bully, Bush/Cheney/Rove are bullies. Condi is a bully. DeLay is the hammer of a bully. Yes there are people who need daddies but we need them to be compassionate and caring, while occasionally firm and supportive. We don't need bullies, and yet we accept all the time.
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Comment by: Karen Novak at April 20, 2005 09:14 PM
The "Daddy" thing is not a function of gender or parenting. The "Daddy" thing is the toxic hazard in any culture that supports its actions on a monotheistic-based foundation. I don't care what you call the Fount of Creation, but if you see your source as a solitary male or female act of human-mirroring will, then you have rendered what it means to be human into an algorithm. We are not the offspring of our philosophies. We are the offspring of a passion born of a force that knows its own mortality. The Story of the Birth of a Single, Asexual Male or Female Godhead was the advent of the phallic or vaginal as machine for a self-replicating model designed for salvation. Your soul as a thing of an assembly line.
Once you take sexual randomness out of the equation, we are puppets at best. Those who propose to remove that sexual randomness out of fear of a resulting human being it cannot control are the enemy of our salvation. If in God We Trust...let us let go and actually trust. Have you seen the photos from the Hubble telescope? Do those images look like the record of work for a deity who cares who you sleep with?
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Comment by: la depressionada at April 21, 2005 02:27 PM
i didn't even read this whole post because i'm in shock. not like o my. i mean like the physical kind that happens when one suffers a huge trauma. why?
because as i was dithering about this morning -- before i went to get my haircut (the sitch which necessitated my catching the 3rd avenue bus) and our serendepitous sort of meeting, i started drafting a little thing about medusa (and how i have always had a soft spot in my heart for her) replete with THAT VERY CARRAVAGIO. i also considered using the rubens (i love it so), but i had used it before.
i'm going to have to go back and read your this, but as for me -- i like the old girl. she is the perfect metaphor for a woman's valuing her body over her mind. (and a rather apt one for aging too. i mean you really didn't want to fuck with her.)
so now since it seems clear the stars conspire to bring us together we must help them along. (i don't know why i'm writing like this; it's like i'm channeling an oscar wilde character -- or david niven). anyway. sunday or sooner.
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Comment by: la depressionada at April 21, 2005 02:32 PM
well of course. of course you would identify with her as well. as for the church, it was no surprise at all. not even a little. the only alternative would have been a wolf in sheep's clothing, but the church isn't even ready for that kind of statement. they were comfortable with a wolf (hitleryouth all is forgiven) in wolf's clothing.
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Comment by: Matt Ruben at April 22, 2005 12:09 AM
Another great piece, Lorraine - well said as always, but also very well-writen. A pleasure to read.
I appreciate the other comments, but I want to emphasize what I think is the very important point you're making about gender. It's true that this isn't about men per se; but the whole point about the Christian Right (and the Papacy) is that it's totally patriarchal - not *to* the core, but *at* the core. Gender isn't incidental or dismissable in this respect; and it's more than important to patriarchy: gender is the *product* of patriarchy, and that's what I take to be really important about what you're saying.
It's funny - in this neoliberal, post-sixties time, it seemed there for awhile that issues of patriarchy weren't so important. But now that the forces of religious reaction are so assertive globally - in the Vatican, in parts of the Middle East, in the U.S. Congress and U.S. foreign policy - the "old" arguments about gender and patriarchy are more relevant than ever.
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Comment by: lorraine at April 22, 2005 08:27 AM
Great comments from everyone. Yes. I think there is something in the air. I'm calling it the "mean daddy" syndrome, but it's not gender specific. It's the idea of the patriarchy, of a rigid authoritarianism that springs from a sense of order that comes from organization of a family with the father-figure as the authority and everyone else taking orders and knowing their place. I never thought I'd be in the position in 2005 of having to talk about the resurgence of the patriarchy--it seemed a quaint concept when I studied it as an undergraduate in 1980, but I was wrong. I feel it more now than I did then.
And I see it tied in, as Karen says, to the total denial of the value of creation in favour of the power of destruction--a monotheistic rigidity that denies our very humanity.
I think the mean daddy is a part of all of us. At the moment, he's being allowed to run amok.
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Comment by: spyder at April 20, 2005 07:59 PM