Reclaiming "impotence"

A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall, in an obvious attempt to get a job at Le Monde, described Deputy Leader Cheney's bold use of an expletive on the Senate floor as being an act of "impatient impotence." I guess Josh doesn't understand the history of the word impotence, because if he did, he'd know that it's a word with which any man would be proud to be associated.

I can't blame him. I didn't know about it until recently when Mrs. Christian and her sister explained it to me. It was a Saturday morning last spring. I had just walked into the kitchen where my wife and my sister-in-law were sitting at the table smoking cigarettes and drinking that Dr. Pepper with milk thing they like so much. Upon seeing me, Mrs Christian said, "Here's His Impotence, now." Needless to say, it made me embarrassed and angry, so I snapped back at her. It was then that she taught me the true meaning of impotence.

It's an Old American word from the Middle Ages--Old American is the language we spoke before it became fashionable for everyone to sound like they came from Kansas. It's a form of the word impotent, which in Old American was a contraction of the phrase, "I am potent"--the exact opposite of what people think it means today. At least that's how Mrs. Christian explained it to me--ladies know these things because they write in diaries and read books and stuff.

Now I'm proud when my wife calls me His Impotence, which she does all the time and then giggles with delight. She says it makes her happy to tell the world just how studly her man is.

I think it's time that strong, manly, heterosexual men like ourselves reclaim impotence from it's corruption at the hands of the Josh Marshalls of the world. We can do so by associating it with the ultimate symbol of American impotence, Dick Cheney.

If you have a blog or website, or if you post comments at places that are scanned by google, I urge you to link to the Deputy Leader's webpage using the word impotence (I'm going to put impotence in the "Patriots" section of my blogroll). That way, we will reclaim that word for neoconservatives everywhere.