Huge Boomer Daddy Problems

I’m not surprised at all that huge daddy issues attach to the sons of “greatest generation” fathers, these fixations becoming undeniably evident with the election of Bill Clinton, the first boomer president. Clinton succeeded and DEFEATED a greatest generation homie—son of an eminent family, WWII vet and a guy who was shot down in battle.

Clinton drove those with daddy problems, now amassing on the political right, crazy with resentment. He was seen as a usurper—an unworthy, false and illegitimate inheritor of the mantle of national daddy and supreme leader. Righties imprinted on this resentment. Their presidential candidates ever since have been lesser and unworthy sons of prominent men.

Unconsciously, Clinton was perceived as “sleeping with” the mother—the federal government—revealingly labeled “nanny” by Republicans. Only Republicans get to suckle there, as they do so voraciously, because the federal government is the mother keeping them from having to grow up and out of a permanent state of dependency. Democrats are actual grownups, the father figures who must be destroyed in a fit of Freudian envy. 

Witness the current cycle of Democrats having to clean up Republican messes, changing their diapers after they shit themselves, George W. Bush being an outstanding example.

Mitt Romney might have passed as less than completely incompetent but he’s shown low character in failing to resist the Republican descent into an abyss of degradation and, of course, he made his money in the honored Republican ways, inheritance and exploitation—harvesting the productive resources of deserving working people, as enabled by the buying of influence in Washington.

McCain, too, suffered by comparison with his male progenitors on back, who fought in glorious wars unlike the inglorious mess of Vietnam. McCain succumbed to the pathology, betraying his country in his own way, hiring the scumball, Tucker Eskew, for example, who had slimed him in South Carolina years earlier, to tutor his massively inappropriate running mate, Sarah Palin, in the arts of sleaze.

George W. Bush. Where do we begin? Did privilege help inculcate such worthlessness or was he born that way? In his eyes there were hints of embryonic, organic brain damage and dysfunction. It is NOT NORMAL to engender the kinds of destruction he did without compunction. I argue for inculcation over a layer of innate inadequacy, a combination of nature and (possibly alcoholic) nurture.

Trump is presumably the end-point and perfection of incompetence and ill will. Many of us thought it was Bush but it is important to understand that they both crave and fear exposure, having never achieved escape velocity in adolescence and still cowering under the skirts of the nanny state, to which they are inevitably drawn. They are unadapted to circumstances, and have adopted the need to measure up on their fathers’ terms.

It’s an impossibility.

Circumstances don’t allow it. The opportunity is gone or never existed. They thrash about in pursuit of an authority that can be challenged and proven resilient and worthy when the appropriate authority is their role. Archetypal parentage is hopelessly and feebly defended by Democrats, not to disparage them, because it's impossible to defend in this fictitious arena. Arrestedness has produced a generation of monsters.

They are compelled to destruction. Only their inner resources can prevent it and those are occupied by evil forces compounded now by a legacy of shame too vast to be owned and acknowledged. We are, to an indeterminate degree, doomed, as only an annihilation of some sort can enable our rebirth. Hold on, friends. We are in for a severe reckoning.

Individual and generational authority issues are feeding on one another. It can only end badly. Batten down the hatches and all of that.