American Excursion

Patriarchy in the language of war

An excursion is a brief outing. A pleasure trip. A harmless detour. It is not a war. It is not a school full of dead children. It is not the bodies of the young arranged beneath the language of error, miscalculation, or regret. This is how the American patriarchy speaks now: it lies about violence, softens horror, and expects women to absorb the aftermath while children die.

We are living in an upside-down America, where war is called an excursion and propaganda is mistaken for truth. A nation exports violence abroad, then acts shocked when it is hated for what it has done. And in living rooms across the country, men old enough to know better repeat the language of the regime as though it were common sense.

My 83-year-old stepfather had just gotten back from a cruise when he mentioned they had skipped one of the ports because of civil unrest. I told him that pretty much everyone hates us now, so that was another concern. He snapped back that everyone does not hate us, then immediately reached for the usual script: “illegals,” crime, invasion, threat. He could understand skipping a port because of unrest. He could not understand that a nation can be hated for the violence it exports.

So the logic had to be redirected, away from the white Christian nationalist engine of violence and toward the powerless, because that is how patriarchy and propaganda protect each other. They teach people to fear the vulnerable so they never have to confront the men actually setting the fire.

When I told him to stop watching Fox if he wanted real news, he insisted they tell the truth. There it was — the most dishonest propaganda machine in American media more credible to him than the daughter in front of him. This is the same man who spent his life in a steel mill and helped put me through college so I could study propaganda, persuasion, and media analysis. He believed in my education enough to fund it. He just does not trust what it taught me when a man like Tucker Carlson is speaking from the screen.

That is what patriarchy does through propaganda. It does not merely distort facts. It rearranges loyalty. It teaches him to doubt his own daughter before he doubts the con man on the screen. It hollows out language until even dead children can be rendered “an error.”

And that may be the most American part of all: not only the violence, but the distance from it. The assumption that what we unleash abroad will remain abroad. That the fire will stay over there. That the grief will belong to other parents. Americans have been taught to live with war for so long that many no longer recognize it as human ruin until it reaches their own front door.

That is the excursion. Not the war itself, but the lie that it is brief, manageable, somewhere else, and meant for someone else’s children.

And now the consequences begin to scatter in every direction. The White House says there is no imminent threat to the United States, even as Americans are being taught to live inside the atmosphere of one. There is talk of drones and retaliation, of blocked waterways and armed escorts, of civilian targets, displaced families, rising oil prices, school shootings, and hate crimes.

The war is still being laundered through euphemism, but its effects are no longer abstract. They move through markets, headlines, living rooms, and nervous systems. This is how the regime works: first it teaches you to call war an excursion, then it teaches you to live inside its consequences while pretending they arrived from nowhere.

And corporate media entertains the lie by pretending there is a strategy to debate. They book the panels, shuffle the talking heads into place, and ask whether the president is overreaching or calculating, provoking or projecting strength. But this is the oldest trick in American politics: take corruption, incompetence, or bloodlust, and flatter it with the language of strategy.

There is no strategy here. There is appetite, propaganda, and the confidence that if enough men in suits discuss the lie seriously, the public will mistake seriousness for truth.

My stepfather did not invent this logic. He inherited it. He repeats in miniature what elite white men say at scale: never blame the regime, never blame the men setting the fire, always blame the people closest at hand.

“The enemy is inside the gates.” There is the whole trick in one line. Not the men bombing schools. Not the president calling war an excursion. Not Propaganda Barbie laundering death through euphemism. No — the enemy must always be recast as the vulnerable, the foreign, the women. That is how a brutal politics survives.

Screenshot of post on X by Tommy Tuberville.

And in the same country that calls war an excursion, there are more school shootings, more stochastic terrorism, more places of worship and learning turned into killing grounds. None of this is separate from a culture that keeps teaching people to fear, to dehumanize, to externalize blame, and to cheapen human life.

None of this is separate from the old patriarchal arrangement in which women absorb the cost and bury the children they brought into this world while men in power keep building the machinery that takes them out of it.

This same patriarchal rot extends far beyond war. It has become the governing style: incurious, punitive, anti-intellectual, and proud of all three.

DOGE has always had the moral posture of a fraternity prank carried out with state power: boys breaking things to prove they can, then scrambling for cover when someone asks who authorized the damage. But the depositions reveal the full ugliness of it.

These were not serious men making serious judgments. They were arrogant mediocrities scanning grant descriptions for words like “LGBTQ,” running humanities projects through ChatGPT, and deciding what should live or die. Asked why one grant was flagged, the answer was blunt: “Because it explicitly says LGBTQ.” Asked what books informed those judgments, the answer was cleaner still: “There were no books.” That is not government. It is illiteracy with state power.

This same rot does not stop at war. It reaches into the home, the classroom, the doctor’s office, the womb. Republicans are trying to smuggle abortion bans into the language of equal rights, criminalize pro-choice speech on campus, and repackage domination as protection. Meanwhile, 25% of Gen Z men in America say wives should obey their husbands. None of this is accidental. It is the same patriarchal grammar everywhere: a 21st-century Manifest Destiny written onto women’s bodies.

This is the American excursion: not only the war itself, but the entire architecture of denial that makes it possible. Euphemism for the dead. Propaganda for the frightened. Scapegoats for the guilty. Obedience for women. Spectacle for the comfortable. And underneath it all, the same old promise that the fire will stay over there, that the grief will belong to someone else, that the children counted will never be yours. But that is the lie beginning to crack.

The regime has no conscience. It does not stop because you were polite, patriotic, suburban, or obedient. It only keeps moving, widening the circle of acceptable loss.

So what do we do? We band together and refuse the lie. War is not an excursion. Dead children are not errors. Propaganda is not truth. Scapegoats are not the source of our danger. We stop lending our language to the machinery that launders violence and calls it order. We stop mistaking obedience for virtue. We stop acting as though other people’s children do not belong to us morally.

The machinery widens the circle of acceptable loss. Our task is the opposite: to narrow it. To say no. Not these children, not those women, not these families, not those soldiers, not one more life made expendable for the vanity of men who will never pay the price themselves. If there is anything left to save, it will not be saved by this regime. It will be saved by those willing to name the truth and refuse the terms of this American excursion.

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