Big Daddy Taco
The maga/fascist reaction daily gutting society is driven ultimately by a radical, existential cowardice. Retreating in panic from the demands of the present (not just the historical situation but the anxiety-provoking mystery of existence itself) to a safe, non-existent past, its shrill demands for some imagined tradition, custom, and order — for security — are all symptoms of this. Among other places related to security, like prisons, this leads to the infantile desire for patriarchal order, for a “big daddy” to protect them. That this big daddy they’re searching for is located in the pathological pedophile Trump (hardly a good daddy) is just further evidence of the depths of their delusion and cowardice — a cowardice so profound that it burrows into space-time itself, creating black holes of paranoid delusion, feverish, alternate, racist histories and ontologies that the billionaire-owned mass media, those patrons of fascism, legitimize, normalize and spread into popular culture; black holes from which no light escapes.
The Democrats, in many respects, are radical cowards, too. But while their terror of, and repression of, the mystery of reality has in general not advanced as deeply into florid, paranoid delusion, their cowardice is nevertheless such that it prevents them on the whole from both recognizing and effectively opposing their radical coward colleagues currently unleashing onto society the xenophobia, transphobia, gynophobia, Islamophobia, and all the other phobias that constitute the full spectrum of their existential cowardice.
Of course, (as Leonard Cohen croons) everybody knows. How can one look at one of these lunatics, fearful of not just cities and subways but who see Big Bird and Mister Rogers as threats and not recognize these as expressions of a profound need for security? It would elicit sympathy if it weren’t also so dangerous.
A carousel of confusion, it’s this desire for security that winds up channeled into ideologies promising security and order in the concentric rings of tradition, nationalism, guns, patriarchy, anything that doesn’t actually threaten the order of the present. Analyses that point out that much of this tradition is in fact not just spurious and/or superstitious nonsense but nonsense both desperate to exert control over the ultimately uncontrollable and a source of war, genocide and other atrocities, become identified by their inquisitorial spirit as, what else, a threat to their security. Naturally, torture follows. For this lunacy, and superstition, is not unlike that of the Inquisition. And whether it’s the causes of climate collapse or of the U.S. Civil War, the veracity of modernity’s holocausts and genocides, or the effectiveness of vaccines, knowledge as well-established as the discoveries of Galileo will be similarly suppressed and deformed to coddle the radical cowards. Suppressed not just in the ideological realms of Entertainment but, as we’re increasingly seeing, in the universities as well.
Pseudoscience and superstition and conspiracy theories, the doxa of this church of resentment (one devoted to a vengeful, machine gun Jesus, sacrificing not himself but humanity for security, as opposed to the caring Jesus), proliferate as they try ever more desperately to find security in lies and delusion — accelerating and intensifying these in a vicious cycle as their delusions, alienating them ever further from reality, only further undermine actual security.
As they pursue their barbaric lust for security (a hypertrophic national security as opposed to anything resembling social security), though, it’s notable that the word security itself derives from the Latin se cura, which means free from care. That’s right. They don’t want to care. It leaves one too vulnerable. It’s too scary. A similar sensibility is expressed by Mussolini’s slogan Me Ne Frego, which roughly translates to I don’t care. Didn’t Melania wear a jacket emblazoned with that slogan? So, it becomes clear that the opposite of this cowardice is care, caring about the truth, ie, that we ultimately do not know where we are. And though this can indeed be frightening, we at least do know that we are all together here, wherever this is. That much we do know. And that by caring about this, and for one another (as opposed to fighting with and exploiting and deceiving, attempting to dominate one another in the interest of a narrow notion of security) we can at least know that by not living a lie we will be able to address our collective situation honestly and critically. But we must be careful, another facet of caring. For while courage, as they say, is contagious, cowardice, actively animating and passively enabling the genocidal desires and actions of ICE and other aspects of magaland, is highly contagious too.
The post Big Daddy Taco appeared first on CounterPunch.org.