John Bolton really wants a spanking!

As a new parent and slightly older teacher, I've been thinking a lot about child rearing the last few years. Fifty years ago or so it was completely legitimate to spank a child as an act of discipline. In fact, it was one of the only understood means of disciplining a child. Then began the era of Dr. Spock and this idea that violent discipline leads to more violence - that what a father teaches his child through the acts of force is that the bigger, stronger person wins - leading by bullying.

So spanking is considered - in some communities at least (not in the ones many of my friends and I grew up in) - forbidden.

Of course there was a lot of push-back to that. Some groups specifically arose out of retaliation to these non-traditional ways (Focus on the Family being a prominent one). More importantly, though, a number of parents merely left a void in discipline, not knowing how else one could possibly train a child without physical coercion. So kids are raised without discipline. That's led to a host of problems in middle and upper-class communities where homogeneity is the only real social order that counts with adults. Lower class whites and minorities look at this child-rearing without the rear-ending and laugh. Can't blame them. If the only results you see are some snotty kid talking back to adults without fear, you'd mock the whole process too - that is if you don't already.

Compound this with some heavy Oedipal reflexes and you've got some people hankerin' for a good ol' fashioned spankerin'. For some adults, a little bit of S&M just ain't doing the trick.

For people like John Bolton and Dick Cheney, the US is big, bad mama and Iraq, Iran, North Korea are the bad, bad little boys who need a spanking and need it bad.

Of course, if Bolton and his adherents (which include Sarah Palin) believe that the US is this parent nation, that pretty much sums up their racist, condescending worldviews. To have a fetish to be human, I suppose. To allow your fetish to destroy countless lives is to be a miserable sub-human pig.

Oink, oink, John Bolton. Oink. Oink indeed.