I meant to mention this post of Martin’s from Wisse Words in the week but it slipped my mind, sorry.
But he points out one of the big unspokens about wingnuts, and wingnut pundits in particular, though it’s not a phenomenon that’s exclusive to the US right:that it’s all about Daddy.
Wed 21 Feb 2007
More ReynoldsScruggs over at UFO Breakfast Recipients has read my post on Glenn Reynolds and points out something I missed: that Reynolds’ dad was a moderately famous antiwar protestor himself and much of his behaviour may just be because of unresolved daddy issues:
Now let’s be clear that many young, rebellious kids say awful things. I made my parents wince more times than I care to contemplate when I was in the throes of puberty. And some parents really are pretty dreadful. Growing up and individuating is not always easy, especially in an authoritarian state. So one can understand why some apsects of the angry, frustrated, spiteful child persist into physical adulthood.
They certainly do: witness the angry frustrated, spitefuilly childish rightwing bloggers and commenters in full flow this week post- Reynolds’ call for the assassination of nuclear scientists and clerics who have had the misfortune not to be born white and American. The uber-angry, frustrated, spitefuilly childish Instapundit is right in the vanguard of the Daddy-issues wingers.
There’s certainly past evidence for Scruggs’ thesis that Reynolds (and by extension, his fellow wingnut pundits) has unresolved paternal issues and it comes from a unexpected, hawkish source:
Listen to Yourself, Instaman
by Gene Healy | Jan 9, 2003 | 4 commentsSo here’s Glenn Reynolds on the US (the Daddy Country) and its relationship with other countries (sniveling, spoiled teenage brats with no respect for authority):
LAST NIGHT there was a Cosby show rerun on Nickelodeon. Theo defies his parents, and they leave him with nowhere to live in order to teach him that actions have consequences, and forgiveness isn’t to be taken for granted.
This morning Howard Kurtz is writing about the surprising degree of support, even among conservatives, for the idea of hanging South Korea out to dry. I wonder if there’s a parallel to be drawn here?
… long-term, there’s a lot to be gained by reminding our triangulating allies that American love, and American forgiveness, are not to be taken for granted either. That’s a lesson we keep ramming home to the Germans. And the Koreans need to learn it too.
We live in a world where most of our allies are Theo Huxtables: self-centered, unrealistic, and overconfident in their assorted schemes because they know Heathcliff will always bail them out in the end. But this isn’t a situation comedy.
[…]
Reynolds is like one of those spoiled, crying, snot-nosed children you see shrieking and grabbing their parents’ sleeve in the supermarket. “Daddy! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!, DADDY!! Notice meeeeee!”
But now he’s grown and the tables are turned: when it coms to his own progeny, he sees fatherhood as more of a burden than a joy. Here he is in 2006 giving us some insight into his own upbringing and parenting philosophy:
Children used to provide cheap labor, and retirement security, all in one. Now they’re pretty much all cost and no return, from a financial perspective.
[…]
But Gibson’s slogan unwittingly captures an important aspect of the problem, in the United States and other industrial societies, at least: We’ve taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Longman, the “social costs” of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the “social returns” continue to decline.
Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting “experts” and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what’s amazing isn’t that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all.
[…]
There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.
Am I sensing someone who feels Daddy did not consider father-son interaction a sufficiently high-prestige activity?
I’m no psychologist – other than one undergraduate year which taught me that although ithe subject’s fascinating, psychologists are just plain weird – neither do I have the advantage of being married to one, thus giving my speculations a spurious air of authority.
That said, I am fascinated by the psychology and pathology of wingnuts and that all-too-apparent longing for the ultimate authority figure, a father, lover and all-powerful master all rolled into one.
Reynolds is hardly alone in this yearning: the Bush/Cheney ‘relationship’ demonstrates it every day. Instagenocide is just one of its more visible and extreme manifestations.
