Photo: Elliot Sperber.
While it refers to multiple things (including an SUV, a football team, and a type of missile), more than ever it seems as though the word Patriot is a portmanteau — of patriarchal and idiot. Patr-iot.
Patriarchy, of course, means rule of the father — which in practice translates to the rule of tradition and force. And perhaps this sheds light on why so many support the moron that so many, so revealingly, refer to as Daddy.
I can’t remember when it started, but it caught on last summer when longtime fascist Tucker Carlson creepily described Trump as “Daddy” coming home to deliver “a vigorous spanking.” Remember that? After that chants of “Daddy” and “Daddy’s home” emerged among the red hats. (Why call them brown shirts? Doesn’t the red hat, the hat-red, symbolize the same spirit of fidelity to a demented despot?). But, back to the main point, how much more of a patriarchal idiot can you be than one calling Trump Daddy?
Last fall outside Trump’s big Madison Square Rally here in New York I witnessed several such chants. As one would expect from people chanting Daddy over and over, they looked frightened and childish. Desperately searching for order and safety, in a world that terrifies them, they seek the protection of a “daddy.” It’s pathetic, yes, but that shouldn’t lead us to think that that makes it any less dangerous. Among other things, from its apparent introduction by Tucker Carlson to one of its most recent iterations by longtime racist, misogynist, antisemite Mel Gibson, the Daddy trope is coupled with the threat of violent punishment. When Gibson mentioned Daddy recently he delighted in adding that the patriarch was removing his belt. He didn’t clarify whether this was in order for Big Daddy to simply beat his victims or to also remove his pants and rape them. But this is what the patriarchal idiot, the patri-ot, supports, a confederacy of rapists.
Next week’s holiday, Presidents’ Day, celebrated originally, and officially, as Washington’s Birthday, adds a further layer of irony to all this. For, of course, the Patriarchal idiot must connect Washington, the so-called Father of His Country, with Daddy.
One of the biggest patriarchal idiots to connect the two is Sylvester Stallone, who compared Trump to Washington shortly after the former’s electoral victory. The comparison can only be put forth by a real patr-iot, i.e., a real patriarchal idiot. Because Washington, despite all his slave owning and massacring, earned people’s respect and adulation by voluntarily surrendering power. And he did this twice, resigning first from his military command, famously surrendering his sword like the Roman hero Cincinnatus. And then, after two terms as president, he voluntarily stepped away from power, establishing the tradition of serving no more than two terms. Trump, who has already demonstrated to the entire planet that he’s unwilling to step away from power, who may turn out to be this country’s final president, is nothing like its first. As such it’s absurd, and servile and vile to compare Trump to Washington. But our patr-iots these days are absurd, as well as pathetic, and dangerous. How else can they take a tradition (in this 250th year since the Battles of Lexington and Concord!) supposedly built on the rejection of tyrants and despotic power and twist it into its opposite, fealty to a demented tyrant?
How do they reconcile their proclaimed adoration of the US Constitution with its blatant subversion? Weren’t they worshipping it, carrying it about in their pockets, Birthright Citizenship clause and all, like a sacred talisman just yesterday? It’s easy if you’re a patriarchal idiot, for whom patriarchy takes precedence over any fidelity to egalitarianism and self governance.
To be sure, the patriarchal idiot looks at the Preamble to the United States Constitution and sees something far more limited than what others see. In the phrase General Welfare the patriarchal idiots see the particular welfare, the welfare of the wealthy. In the Preamble’s phrase “domestic tranquility,” which it’s supposedly the Constitution’s purpose to bring about, they see the domestic tranquility of the slave owner — i.e., the police state.
James Monroe, the fifth U.S. President, a slave owner whose name lives on in his imperialist Monroe Doctrine, was therefore correct when he said that the Preamble is the key to the U.S. Constitution, and that laws that contradict the spirit of the Preamble are unconstitutional. This observation, however, is complicated by the fact that there are two contradictory spirits entangled in the Preamble, just as there are two spirits entangled in all of U.S. history: slave owner and abolitionist, aristocrat and egalitarian, heteronomy and autonomy.
There is the spirit of those who recognize the bewildering mystery surrounding us and attempt to govern ourselves carefully within this, with care, love even, for our neighbors; and there is the spirit of those who are frightened, terrified by this mystery, who look to some traditional order for security and seek to dominate and control the other. This latter spirit is the spirit of the fascist, of the patriarchal idiot, so terrified of the world that they search for a Daddy, no matter how deficient, to rescue them from the demands of the actual world, to help them deny a reality that is only growing more deadly.
But the opposite of patriarchy, as Germaine Greer memorably pointed out (memorialized in Sinead O’Connor’s song Germaine), is not matriarchy so much as it is fraternity; not the fraternity of the frat house but of the revolutionary slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, something more akin to solidarity, or mutual aid. (In many respects, then, the opposite of the patriot, the patriarchal idiot, is simply the good neighbor.) To begin to ameliorate the profound dangers confronting us, we must disentangle these two spirits, neutralizing the one while nourishing the other in practice. And, just maybe, we can take this key, the Preamble, and use it to open a new door, to a new society altogether.
