On Angry Daddies, Ukraine and Undoing a Coup [Parts I-III]
In Which Every Day is Angry White Man Day, & In Which We Discover that We are in a Monster Movie, Not a Police Procedural... also, FAFO from the Past, Where Mandela & Douglass Show Us How It's Done
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.
In these crazy and dangerous times we are called upon to speak impolite truths, loudly and without apology
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.
Part II: In Which We Discover that We are in a Monster Movie, but We’re Behaving like We’re in a Police Procedural
Our current danger descends almost entirely from our inability to properly perceive Donald and JD and Elon as what they are, as insatiable and remorseless predators. If they looked as dangerous as they are - like goose-stepping Nazis or fire-breathing monsters from outer space - we would have driven them off a long time ago. But their symbolic status as father figures to the nation somehow short-circuits our ability to see them clearly - fangs and all - and to protect ourselves. Even many thoughtful and progressive journalists reflexively persist in reporting on them as if they were somewhat normal politicians, even if rather unsettling and potentially disastrous politicians. And even the most daring and clearsighted journalists generally still fall into the trap of saying, well, yes, they have actually done all these terrible things, but they couldn’t possibly, actually be all THAT bad. For instance: yes, they’re breaking all kinds of laws as they smash up the government, but it’s really pretty inconceivable that they wouldn’t stop all their naughty behavior when a judge tells them to. (This particular - fundamental - article of faith took a beating over the weekend when the Trump Administration extradited hundreds of people without due process and despite a judge’s order. It appears that this is yet another bright red line that is now behind us.) Or, yes, it does kind of look like Donald is aligning himself with Vladimir Putin to crush democracy here in America, in Ukraine and throughout Europe, but that can’t actually be what’s really happening because that would be just unimaginably bad. Or, yes, RFK Jr does appear to be destroying our public health system and our ability to fight cancer and measles and a whole bunch of other diseases, but that would be a completely insane thing to do, so there must be some way in which this is part of making an imperfect system somehow better in the end. Or, yes, Elon - the unelected, unconfirmed and profoundly disinhibited South African billionaire - does appear to be “trimming waste” in the federal government not with a scalpel but by knocking down one agency after another and then setting fire to the wreckage, but surely this is just a case of well-intended enthusiasm that will soon be set right.
No - absolutely, utterly and forever no - to all of the above.
We are caught in an escalating feeding frenzy of sociopaths and deranged narcissists, and we are the food. If we don’t start to believe what our eyes are telling us and act - soon - in our own defense, then we stand to lose everything: our democracy, our rights, our money, our health, our lives.
These Angry Daddies are not here to help us. We need to stop parsing their words looking for signs of their love or reasonableness or sanity and we need to start paying intense and obsessive attention to their predatory behavior and to the mortal danger they pose to our democracy and to ourselves.
WE ARE IN A MONSTER MOVIE, BUT WE’RE BEHAVING LIKE WE'RE IN A POLICE PROCEDURAL, OR SOME SORT OF OLD-FASHIONED DETECTIVE STORY. We’re at that part of the movie where the monsters are running amok and bodies are starting to pile up, but we’re still carrying on as usual, apparently assuming that Cary Grant or Colombo or Inspector Clouseau are going to pop up and save us, but they’re not. Colombo’s rumpled “just one more thing” routine won’t work in this situation, and it’s not necessary, because we already know whodunit. The issue isn’t finding the culprits, it’s protecting their intended victims - which is pretty much all of us - and the issue is making them stop.
They will not stop on their own. We will have to make them stop.
But how?
The current moment is chaotic and overwhelming, which is by design. Trying to find a useful and prudent path forward through all the chaos and uncertainty will make your head spin. So let’s try it in reverse, working backwards based on what we know to be true and what we can assume about how all of this is likely to end. I’d be very happy if any of the following three points were wrong, but I fear they are not.
Trump will not leave power willingly. He knows that a return to the rule of law will very likely land him in prison, so he’ll do everything he can to stay in power.
When we try to remove him from power, either through elections or for his many high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump will try to use the military to prevent this.
In the end, our ability to remove Trump from power will depend entirely on the American military making the choice to defend democracy and the Constitution rather than defending Trump. To put this more plainly, I believe it to be the case that American democracy will live or die based on how many of the men and women in our military refuse to follow an unlawful order to shoot civilians and politicians. Period.
To the extent that the points above are true, then the only thing that matters between here and there is what we can do to increase the likelihood that the military will defend democracy. If Trump’s power seems solid and unassailable when Trump ultimately puts the military in the streets, then the individual men and women in our military will be under more pressure to do as they’re told and attack civilians, because it will be less apparent that there is any viable alternative.
Therefore, our goal is and must be to become the visible and viable and irresistible champions of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Like our lives depend on it, because they do.
Part III: FAFO from the Past - In Which Nelson Mandela and Frederick Douglass Show Us How It’s Done
The Republican Party has become the party of untruth and unreality. It’s their most obvious and unifying brand. They’ve become a social club for people who believe or disbelieve a whole menagerie of ridiculous things, many of which are dangerous, wildly antisocial or flat-out abusive: that violence or discrimination towards lesbian or gay or trans or Muslim individuals either doesn’t exist, or that yes it does exist but it’s both justified and appropriate; that there’s no such thing as climate change; that racism and sexism don’t exist, or if they do exist then they’re probably justified and appropriate, or - alternatively - that yes they exist but the primary victims of racism and sexism are in fact White people and men. Many MAGA followers will tell you with a straight face that a party led by power-mad, chainsaw-wielding billionaires is going to serve the needs of the working class, that Donald is only going to deport the “bad” immigrants and not their friends and family members, and that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. During the height of the pandemic, MAGA orthodoxy was that Covid wasn’t real, or if it was real then it wasn’t actually all that dangerous, a belief for which tens if not hundreds of thousands of MAGA followers paid with their lives. The cornerstone MAGA belief is that Biden lost in 2020, when he in fact won by 4.4 points and seven million votes representing 51.3% of the electorate. Conversely, MAGA also believes that Trump’s 2024 win - by 1.5 points and 2.3 million votes representing 49.8% of the total - represents an enormous victory and a mandate for unprecedented, wrecking ball change. The belief that Ukraine somehow attacked Russia and not the other way around is a shiny new MAGA belief that pairs well with the older MAGA belief that Putin is a more trustworthy, reliable and desirable partner than our traditional democratic allies in Europe and elsewhere.
All of this is clearly, obviously, demonstrably wrong, in addition to being just plain dumb. Truth is MAGA’s kryptonite. So we should beat them, relentlessly, with truth, and with the escalating costs and consequences of their chickenshit, head-in-the-sand complicity and denial.
But how?
There is a phenomenon called the Mandela Effect, in which people collectively remember some event or cultural detail that didn’t actually happen or that is different from their recollection. I’m aware that I may be contributing to the Mandela Effect with some of the specifics of the following, but the outline of the story is true, and it happens to involve Nelson Mandela. In my life, I have encountered two moments of political and spiritual warriorship that stopped me in my tracks and changed my understanding of what is possible in fierce defense of the truth. (In reality there are probably at least three of these moments, but I learned about Martin Luther King Jr and his “I Have a Dream” speech when I was very young and I don’t remember a moral pantheon without him in it.) At some point twenty or thirty years ago, I saw - only one time - a short video of an interaction between Nelson Mandela, the then newly-freed leader of the Black South African opposition, and F. W. De Klerk, the White president of South Africa who had released Mandela from prison. As I recall, they were both speaking on the floor of the South African parliament. At one point as De Klerk was speaking there in front of the other Afrikaner lawmakers he made some passing claim that I remember as seeming relatively innocuous, the kind of boilerplate and conventional untruth that often passes without notice or challenge. Mandela wasn’t having it. As I recall, the two men were facing one another not that far apart on the floor. Mandela interrupted - immediately and without hesitation - the moment De Klerk spoke the offending phrase. Mandela may have raised his arm, and I recall that he spoke with clarity and directness.
Tyranny itself may seem unassailable, but tyranny is built of a thousand mean and stupid little lies. Let the lies pass unchallenged and tyranny grows stronger. Destroy the lies, one by one - without fear or apology - and the walls must eventually come tumbling down.
What I remember Mandela saying to De Klerk, there in the lion’s den, in a voice that cut like a diamond, was this:
“That, sir, is a lie.”
This, to the leader of a violently racist state and to the man who had personally released him from prison - and who could presumably send him back - while surrounded on all sides by dozens of the highest ranking members of that violently racist state. The gold standard for speaking truth to power. The dictionary definition of fierce and unintimidated resistance to evil. May we all be so bold.
[And I may be misremembering the exact quote, or some other detail of this confrontation, but Mandela’s boldness, his clarity and his irresistible integrity were staggering, and as described. And, regardless of whether Mandela said this particular line in this particular circumstance, “That, sir, is a lie” is a pretty ferocious and appropriate response to much of what MAGA is spouting at the moment. Don’t debate them. Beat them with truth. Over and over and over again.]
The second moment that stopped me in my tracks - and that changed my life - I encountered in high school, when we read “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”. Everything about Frederick Douglass deserves more time than we have right now, but hopefully even a brief recounting of this incident will be of use. About two-thirds of the way through his Narrative, Douglass describes what he calls “the turning-point in my career as a slave”. As punishment for his increasing independence of mind, Douglass was sent by his master to live for a year with a slave-breaker named Edward Covey, where he was brutally abused. About halfway through this ordeal, Douglass went to his master asking for protection and to be sent to another home because he was sure that Covey would kill him if he stayed where he was. His master refused and sent him back. Almost immediately upon his return, Covey attacked him again but, as Douglass wrote, “at this moment - from whence came the spirit I don’t know - I resolved to fight”. To lay hands on a White man was punishable by death, but Douglass did it anyway. The two men brawled for almost two hours and Covey got by far the worst of it. Douglass reports that in the remaining six months Covey never laid so much as a finger on him in anger, and that “My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place”. Douglass also writes that “I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”
It’s that last sentence, formal as it is, that rearranged my head and has stayed with me ever since. In its simplest form: “If you want to beat me down, you’re gonna have to kill me.”
Amen.
Like the great Frederick Douglass - like Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and like the millions who came before us, whose sacrifices and accomplishments this traitorous regime would erase and destroy - let us now resolve to fight.
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