On Angry Daddies, Ukraine and Undoing a Coup: Part I

In Which Every Day is Angry White Man Day

JD Vance’s bravura return to the spotlight in last month’s shameful Oval Office mugging of President Zelenskyy happened one day before the twenty-eighth anniversary of my father’s death. My father, to his credit, would almost certainly have despised Donald Trump and recognized him as the bullying, shallow, incoherent predator that he is. But watching JD’s disgraceful tag team ambush of President Zelenskyy, I was viscerally reminded of no one so much as my dad.

There are some days where you know as it’s happening that you’re witnessing something important, something that’ll be studied and analyzed for years to come. There are some days after which everything is different. Friday, February 28th was one of those days. For those of you lucky enough to have missed that Friday’s disappointing finale to America’s eighty-year run as Leader of the Free World, an extremely short summary is in order. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to the Oval Office expecting to sign an extortionate agreement granting mineral rights to the US, presumably in exchange for some ill-defined security arrangements. What Zelenskyy got instead was ambushed. It started with a snippy JD self-righteously and dismissively “explaining” that of course normal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin was the proper way to end the war. This was the set-up. President Zelenskyy then patiently listed many of the times that Putin had broken previous diplomatic agreements with Ukraine and asked JD exactly what kind of diplomacy he was talking about. This led to JD turning up the anger a couple of notches and accusing Zelenskyy of being disrespectful and ungrateful and manipulative, and to JD repeatedly demanding that Zelenskyy say thank you to President Trump. Donald himself joined in, angrily scolding Zelenskyy and ranting about world war three and disrespect, and how Zelenskyy doesn’t have the cards right now, to which an incredulous Zelenskyy responded “I’m not playing cards”, but the trap was sprung and it could not be unsprung, nor was it designed to be. There has never been such a public attack on an ally visiting the Oval Office. Ever. The whole thing was insane and delusional, and painful to watch.

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With the fall of France in 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine. In response, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed America to be the Arsenal of Democracy and began sending boatloads of weapons and supplies that allowed the Brits to survive the darkest period of the war. This is not so different from the Biden Administration’s arming of Ukraine these last three years. America does not have a spotless record of supporting democracy. We‘ve supported dictatorships - especially during the Cold War, as a supposed counterweight to Russian/Soviet influence - but what we are witnessing now is a 180 degree turn away from America’s imperfect tradition of defending democracy and towards a new and terrifying alliance with the worst dictatorships in the world.

This is what it would’ve looked like if America had sided with the Nazis in WWII.

Zelenskyy’s Oval Office beatdown is a vision of the upside-down world to come. It’s as if FDR had decided that rather than sending weapons to the Brits, he would instead hold a public event to humiliate Winston Churchill and try to force him to surrender twenty percent of English territory to Hitler in order to achieve something he could then call “peace” during the Battle of Britain. It was an utterly disgusting and appalling betrayal of democracy, of American values, of our European allies, and of the people of Ukraine. It’s also just plain dumb.

The shameful spectacle of JD and Donald giddily slapping around a heroic and vulnerable ally is only part of what happened in the meeting, but it has thoroughly dominated media coverage in which it has generally been presented as some sort of spontaneous and inexplicable lapse of protocol that erupted during one of those normally-oh-so-boring press conferences. How odd. Googling “Trump Zelenskyy spat” returns articles by the AP, USA Today, Fox, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR among others, all of them using this absurd and diminishing word (“spat”) in their titles, completely missing the point. The betrayal of Ukraine is a moral atrocity, but the bigger story, of which Ukraine is only the awful first chapter, is that the ambush of President Zelenskyy is being used as a distraction from - and a justification for - a larger goal, which is a movement away from our traditional democratic allies and a growing alliance with Vladimir Putin’s crumbling medieval dictatorship, and with other atrocious, brutal and anti-democratic regimes around the world.

A more concise, relevant and helpful summary of what happened in the meeting might sound something like this: “JD and Donald’s Oval Office ambush featured a lot of Kremlin talking points and absurd lies aimed at President Zelenskyy by two men who are not worthy to clean his shoes”. It was a morality play for the After Times, in which the corrupt and the vile demonstrate for our edification their ability to abuse the good and the brave, simply because they feel like it. Because truth and justice and the common good do not exist in their world. In their world only greed and power are real. The whole thing was, in short, evil and stupid and petty. This is what fascism looks like.

But I digress. Let us return once again to the subject of me and my dad. Like my dad, JD is a lawyer, trained at a fancy law school. They have similar beards, rugged, but not too rugged because it is necessary always to appear to be respectable and proper. Respectability is their protective coloration - like the stripes on a tiger in the forest - making it difficult to see the danger until it’s too late. Like my dad, JD presents himself as a profoundly “rational” person. Like my dad, JD is angry pretty much all the time, but his anger is always righteous and it is always someone else’s fault. Like my dad, JD’s anger may be constant, but it is not without variety and modulation. Sometimes JD is merely annoyed. Sometimes he is very, very angry, but he does not shout. He is “right” and “reasonable”. He is credentialed and powerful, he does not need to shout. He assumes he will win because he is “right”. And much of the time - by virtue of credentials and position and supposed respectability - he is the one who gets to decide who is right, or at least this is the story he believes, and too often we believe it right along with him, because we have not yet freed ourselves of this dangerous habit.

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TO SEE CLEARLY THAT WHICH IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US IS NOT AN UNCOMPLICATED THING. Years ago I was living in Western Massachusetts when the remains of a hurricane blew through, dumping a ridiculous amount of rain in a day and a night. In the morning I got up and took a shower, and when I came back to the bedroom I remember standing in the doorway - dripping wet and wrapped in a towel - staring at the bed aware that something was wrong and also aware that it was taking me way longer than it should have to figure out what it was. What had happened was this: the rain had collapsed a good bit of the ceiling onto my bed, and there were chunks of plaster and dust everywhere. It turns out that even at the most literal level, what we see is largely what we expect to see. Images are not simply registered by the eyes and then instantly “seen” in the brain. There’s an intermediate step where the images are interpreted before being passed along to the rest of the brain, and this interpretive process relies heavily on prior knowledge and previous experience in order to make sense of what we’re seeing. It was this interpretive process that was having trouble with the fact that the ceiling was no longer where it was supposed to be and that it was now, instead, spread out all over my bed.

Seeing clearly is immensely more difficult when it involves emotionally charged subjects like our fathers and our tribes.

Daddy’s Home

My father had his good qualities, which I miss. He could be warm and thoughtful and protective when it suited him, and when he wasn’t set-off by some random thing: no milk for dinner; the car in front not moving fast enough after the light changed; chores undone. But he was an unaccountable and rage-filled narcissist with unquenchable appetites and there is literally no bad thing of which I believe him to be incapable. Life with him was a scary and unpredictable roller coaster, too often ruled by his anger and his moods. It turns out that growing up in forced proximity to such a dangerous and out of control creature was useful preparation for recognizing danger in these crazy times and for identifying the rituals of domination and aggression and appeasement that are the real engines of so much of what’s going on right now. Those of us who were raised in these circumstances, and there are a lot of us, are presented with a series of moral and existential choices as we’re growing up. Will we reject the predator in front of us - and purge the predator inside of us - in an attempt to become a good and kind and honorable person, or will we embrace the external predator and seek to become an even bigger predator ourselves? Or, alternatively, will we train ourselves to avoid or deny or minimize all the uncomfortable truths so we can pretend that everything’s “fine” and continue our familiar captivity, hoping that our passivity and lack of resistance will keep us safe? None of these paths are easy but only one of them is the path of freedom and sanity, and it’s never too late to change lanes.

Warming up the crowd for a Trump rally last October, Tucker Carlson summarized Trump’s appeal with the words: “Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed.” Tucker then promised that Trump would give America a vigorous spanking for being a “Bad little girl”. When Trump hit the stage people chanted “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!”. You can buy “Daddy’s Home” T-shirts online, with a picture of Donald in front of the White House. Trump’s cult is, I believe, largely made up of people who are still hostage to their own complicated and largely unexamined upbringings: people who feel a homecoming in Donald’s aggressive persona, and who see in Donald a righteously Angry Daddy who they can celebrate and appease, in a way that presumably feels familiar. By proving their loyalty and their worthiness through their uncritical obedience they hope that Donald will see them and love them, and that he will protect them from all the bad things and all the bad people. In reflexively making themselves captive to an Angry Daddy who does not have their best interests at heart, Trump’s followers have sent themselves - and all the rest of us - hurtling towards disaster.

But it’s not just the people of MAGAworld who would be well-served by examining their daddy issues, the rest of us also have to purge ourselves of our reflexive deference to the Angry Daddies of the world.

Throughout my teens and twenties I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours arguing with my father about politics. Arguing about his personal behavior would’ve been way too loaded, so politics was where we metaphorically battled over truth and justice, and these battles were formative experiences in my life. But even these arguments were, I realize now, a form of obedience and complicity. They were roleplaying. They were a way in which I conspired to keep the secret of his unfitness, from him and also from myself. Such behavior is no longer helpful, if it ever was. In these crazy and dangerous times we are called upon to speak impolite truths, loudly and without apology, in order to break the spell, in order to free ourselves from those who would keep us endlessly debating while they carry on doing bad things.

So, at the risk of oversharing, I offer the following example of the breaking of one Angry Daddy’s spell. And this isn’t the worst of the things my dad did, it’s just the thing that was most obviously and uncomplicatedly and impersonally lame, and that permanently dis-enthralled me from his endless drama:

My righteously angry, moralizing, judgmental, uptight, conservative father cheated on my mother. By this I do not mean that he once made out with an old flame, or that he had a secret girlfriend, or two, or three. I mean that my dad cheated on my mom constantly, for more than a decade, by having unprotected sex with hundreds and hundreds of strangers, male and female, that he connected with by using the back pages of some Philly paper and a secret PO Box throughout much of the 1970s and 80s. In the end, he only stopped because he was afraid of getting AIDS, not because of any moral or ethical qualms he might’ve had. About ten years after he stopped he finally told my mom what he’d done. In response, she told him “then you’re just like your dad and you have no integrity”. My dad’s response was clarifying. My father had lied constantly about where he was and who he was and what he was doing for at least a decade. He had taken time and money and attention and intimacy away from his family. He foolishly risked his own life and health, and he constantly exposed my mother to dangerous and potentially deadly diseases without her knowledge. My father’s response to my mother when she said he had no integrity was the following: he said that no, he had not compromised his integrity because the sex didn’t mean anything, it was “just sex”. At this point my father was in his fifties and supposedly an adult, and this was the best answer his highly trained legal mind could come up with after at least a decade of dangerous, dishonorable behavior, and another decade in which to think about it. I didn’t find out about this until after he died, and my strong initial reaction - which remains to this day - wasn’t anger or indignation or sadness, which had all been so frequently part of my relationship with my dad. It was just this: Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic… And, to be clear, it wasn’t really the sex that was the problem. The problem was his utter lack of principle and accountability and empathy, and the lack of even the most basic self-awareness or curiosity about anyone else’s experience. All the intrigue and compulsion to somehow truly connect with my father was obliterated by the revelation that his inner, moral life was this small and barren and utterly corrupt.

Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic…

I could’ve argued with my father for 100,000 hours and never gotten any closure or progress or meeting of the minds, because my father wasn’t arguing out of principle or curiosity. He wasn’t actually communicating with me, he was only playing a part. He would’ve led me in circles forever, and I would’ve followed, made captive by my desire to understand or to make better, or - like him - to be “right”. But my father was only making angry, meaningless noises with his mouth in order to maintain the protective veneer of principled respectability that gave him power. Seeing this so brutally revealed as the pathetic, empty farce that it was set me free. There was no righteous meaning to understand. There was only ugly behavior to reject and oppose.

To return to where we began, the same moral judo applies to Donald and JD and Elon and the rest, whether they’re grotesquely berating a man who’s many times their better in the Oval Office or traitorously undermining democracy, shredding the Constitution, or destroying the public services on which all our lives depend. There is no righteous meaning to understand. There is only predatory behavior to reject and oppose.

Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic…

Their whole pompous, condescending, righteous, angry schtick only works if we pretend along with them that they’re not entirely full of shit. If we pretend along with them that they’re “proper”, that they are not in fact morally and spiritually deficient and fundamentally corrupt, then we surrender our power and make ourselves willingly captive to their meaningless and aggressive words. If, on the other hand, we focus on their clearly degenerate and predatory behavior then we break the spell and make it possible for us to rise effectively to our own defense.

This is Part 1 of 3

Part II: In Which We Discover That We’re in a Monster Movie, Not a Police Procedural - is HERE

Part III: FAFO from the Past - In Which Nelson Mandela and Frederick Douglass Show Us How It’s Done - is HERE

The Whole Essay (Parts 1-3 as one unit) - is HERE

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